Summer evening light

There are some landscapes that become so familiar you no longer look at them; but there are some views that, although they aren't dramatic, take on a special quality because you do see them regularly.

Last night I took my camera with me when a drove to the pilates class in a neighbouring village, I wanted to capture the view across the fields where Suffolk meets Cambridgeshire. This is one of my 'slow-burn' inspirations which will emerge into a print or painting one day; there's something about the arrangement of trees and small woods across a gently rolling eiderdown of wheat fields, side lit by the evening sunlight, that makes the space in front of me seem vast. If views where music this one for me is Vaughan Williams's 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' and I imagine myself taking giant steps over the fields as light as air.


On my way home two hours later, the sun has just dipped below the horizon and clouds are rolling in from the north-east. You can just see a fine crescent moon on the edge of the cloud.


The horizon glows pink, red and gold silhouetting the squatting woods that seem to nestle down lower into to the wheat fields as if settling down to sleep.


It's frustrating that photographs (unless taken by a master of landscape photography) flatten and shrink the view. But I can use these to recollect the images in my head.