Through the pinhole.

As I mentioned before, the Lumix has a novelty setting called 'pinhole'. This is supposed to produce the effect of an old pinhole camera, softening the focus, leaching out the colour, and creating an ellipsoid penumbra around the subject. It seems a quaint irony that it is a mark of the camera's sophistication that it has a special function to mimic its primitive ancestor.

However, the results can be intriguing. Doubtless the same could be achieived using Photoshop, but would take more time, and also, doing it on the camera, the file size is significantly reduced, the images being well under a megabyte in size against the 4 mb or more when the camera is used normally, whereas using PS would probably increase their size.

I took it out the other day on a walk, on the kind of day at this time of the year when all is grey, bleak and sparse, the colours already leached out of things. The recent maize harvest, though welcome as always for opening up the countryside, revealing views which had long been absent, also temporarily has the effect that always occurs when something substantial is removed that one has become accustomed to seeing there, of uncomfortable, bereft absence, where other things struggle to fill the unwonted space. And the land always looks so muddied and spent, so sucked bare by it. The stalks are wan ghostly things, they look like an indecipherable script, an attempt to write from a bad dream, something wanting but failing to be understood.

Altogether, a melancholy day and a melancholy mood, and the dark-surrounded, desaturated, stripped-back pinhole images were exactly what we called for.

The tree stands forlornly over an ossuary of other trees.

In the view down to the mournful sarcophagus of Plémy church, I haven't desaturated the image at all, only warmed it up to make it like sepia.

And the scraggy sallows reflected in the factory warehouse window didn't need any enhancement to render them sepia,

neither did the sunburst view inland, to make it gloomily dramatic.

But in the orange opening of the iris foetidissima pod I have increased the colour, so that it seems to emerge quite joyfully from the dark around it.

The only remedy for melancholy is melancholy. We need shadows, even, or especially, invoked ones.

Next time, perhaps, Lumix will show you something more luminous...