Well, congratulations to Bri-n for single-handedly jinxing the entire British weather for a complete month! Cheers Bri-n!
Within a day or two of him announcing this project’s launch theme of “August” I knew exactly what I wanted to shoot and, given that the theme was for the month of August as well, I didn’t really anticipate any major problems.
All I needed was about a week of uninterrupted typically August weather… y’know the sort of thing… hot and dry (possibly bordering on heatwave even). The type of weather that dries out and cracks the earth.
Yeah. Right.
So what do we get over here in the UK? Clouds, rain, more clouds, more rain, overcast, more rain, and so on. The odd spot of sunshine here and there, but not the sort I was after.
Now were I a certain person who shall remain nameless I’d spend the next ten minutes or so bitching about the vagaries of Mother Nature. But me being me, whilst still waiting right to the last week of August to see if things would brighten up, I just started thinking about my “Plan B”. Which is what I’ve ended up with.
So what does August mean to me? Having toyed with the idea of an interpretation based upon the adjective (as in “an august personality”) I then decided to revert to the more common usage as in August the month and, in thinking about this, gradually came to the conclusion that its probably the month I like least of all!
For me August conjures up images of hot days. Really hot days, as in scorching heatwave hot… and lasting for ages. Drought-inducing weather in fact.
Now whilst I enjoy high temperatures it seems to me there’s something about August weather that sets it apart from the months either side… its as though there’s a “fierceness” about it that neither July or September share.
But there’s something else as well, and this is when it dawned on me that I don’t actually like August very much. For, underlying the superficially sunny, cheery days there always seems to me to be something rather unpleasant lurking.
The first hint maybe of coming rottenness… a foreshadowing of decay and corruption. And maybe something even darker, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.
All elements of which fed into into my choice of an image (in both “Plan A” and “Plan B”). How well it works is another matter entirely of course. And spoiled to no small extent by the fact that the day I finally did the shoot was quite overcast, the perversity of the weather holding good to the last by depriving me of even an hour or so of really bright sunshine! So the quality of the light wasn’t as I’d hoped for.
And don’t be fooled by the fact I’ve only contributed one photo for this, the inaugural month’s theme. I actually shot about fifty or so frames ’til I’d got close to what I wanted!
