Thomas Traherne

Thomas Traherne

‘Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.’

Thomas Traherne was a Herefordshire priest and poet, and he saw beauty and goodness all around him.

He once wrote that nothing is ‘ordinary’ – and I’ve had a couple of discussions with one of my friends here on EPZ about said friend’s ability to make the ‘everyday’ beautiful. He and Traherne share an ability to see the beauty in everything, and to draw other people’s attention to it.



I think that a lot of us share the desire, when we take a photograph, to capture a moment when we have seen beauty and bring it to others, to spread the gift we have received far and wide. It’s a generous impulse, something spiritual in the least religious of people.

What’s this got to do with photography in the time of coronavirus? It means that we can all find a creative path through a high degree of isolation and restricted travel. That a tangle of computer wires or a pile of discarded vegetable choppings are full of beauty, and the challenge is twofold. First, to perceive the beauty: and second, to identify the way to isolate it and light it to show off that beauty.

Isolate, yes. Because it’s often very important to remove, or at least play down the background, the context. In a portrait, it can be as simple as throwing the background out of focus, and making sure that threes, lamp posts and lightshades don’t grow out of the subject’s head. With cutlery in a drawer, it may be about removing one or two items, or burning in the area where the floor shows in the corner.

Sometimes, a long or macro lens will be the best tool, but you may be surprised how good the pictures can be with your standard lens, whatever it is.

Edward Weston prints of single peppers sell for thousands of pounds. Light and composition… As my EPZ friend said, nothing is ‘everyday’ or ‘ordinary’ if you are seeing the world aright.

All the pictures in this blog (plus my main post today) were taken in the course of a 5-minute wander around the house. The one in the middle shows where I've set up some cut peppers and a camera to record the drying and rotting process: I'm lucky to have space for this, and a spare camera body to leave on a tripod for a week.