Seasons Change | Monthly Montages (Monthages)
Human-Nature picked up through Twitter a series of Tweets by Martin George@JannerBirder, a collection of landscape photo montages, each capturing a sequence of 12 images shot at monthly intervals from the very same spot.
These show particularly well how the light and ground conditions change, and how things move on through the seasons. How the vegetation grows and greens over the Spring and Summer, then declines and fades away in Autumn, back to Winter again.
We thought Martin’s images might make an inspiring way to encourage our own followers to take a similar monthly walk into a landscape they love, and capture for themselves how the landscape evolves and regenerates, as the seasons change. We thought that this would be a great way for people to gain some regular ‘green exercise’ in their favourite landscape and do something a bit creative with their nature photography skills.
Here at Human-Nature we’ll be trying too, with our volunteer group ‘Friends with Human-Nature‘. Over the coming year, we’ll try our best to do the same, using our own personal favourite Staffordshire landscapes and we’ll share the results on this website and on Twitter – but we see no reason why everyone else out there shouldn’t join us and share their own monthly image montages with us too.
Perhaps we can even call them #Monthages. By all means tweet them as you build your own portfolio of ‘monthages’, addressing your Tweets @HNEscapesCIC with the hashtag #Monthages, and we’ll do our best to re-tweet them – perhaps adding some to this post.
(It might help to choose use a landscape feature to mark your position, so you take the next photo from exactly the same spot – the top of a particular fence post for instance).
We also thought that taking a monthly photo walk is an ideal time to reflect at those regular intervals – perhaps on the month just gone, the season closing, or the new season just starting. It’s an opportunity to reflect back, to see what’s changed, but also to look forward. Perhaps to reflect on what we personally might need to do to effect change in our lives – maybe to achieve a specific positive goal, or perhaps work towards improving our own personal wellbeing. Change is inevitable and nothing stands still. Seasons change and the environment adapts, to grow and flourish again – and perhaps we can too?
Who knows, like Martin, you might be lucky enough to capture a rainbow, or be moved to see something more positively in the world around you.
We’re often amazed when we take groups out doing therapeutic photography, just how beautiful and inspiring our natural environment really is. Even places so close to home and almost in our own back yard, just as long as we take the time to look, to see and appreciate.
Seasonal change of course occurs due to the Earth tilting on its own axis. Although straight, the axis never stands directly vertical. Whilst the earth remains the same distance from the sun, it tilts as it orbits, exposing some parts of the world to more sunlight with longer and warmer days, while other parts receive less light, bringing darker and colder days. Summer occurs in one hemisphere when it shines more directly onto that part of the Earth, providing more intense and prolonged light. So it’s always Summer somewhere!
The Winter months can seem rather dark, dismal and grey, and we as humans do miss that benefit that the warmth and light that even our UK Summers can bring.
The winter can seem long and hard, but there’s still plenty to enjoy out in the landscape – even the frost and ice crystals have a way to shine and show their brilliance, even on the harshest and coldest of days.
We all have to go through the Winter, in order to appreciate the coming Spring and Summer.
Be assured, Summer will arrive soon enough.
Landscape montages are Copyright of Martin George – thanks Martin for allowing us to use your images. Frost and macro images are 2017 Copyright of Jeremy Cliffe for Human-Nature Escapes CIC.