The Nag, the wrong lens, and a Kelpie enchantment.

I read a snippet of advice the other day about advice, and the advice was that by the age of thirty-five you should be at the stage of telling people where to stick their unsolicited advice. I’m late to the party, but I’m definitely someone who needs to start practising. I’m an absolute magnet for people who want to manage, fix, alter, improve or generally shut me down and turn me into someone else.

I have an internal critic who really doesn’t need any help, my Inner Nag, if you like.

Yesterday I found myself on an impromptu surprise visit to The Kelpies at The Helix, Falkirk. I grabbed my camera and left the camera bag in the car, and I didn’t do any thinking. Not over-thinking doesn’t last long with me, so by the time I had walked up to the Kelpies, I was cursing myself for leaving the camera bag and my other lens, in the car.

“The Kelpies are huge, and a zoom lens is not the right lens to take good photos… you’ve brought the wrong lens, stupid…” and so on.

But there’s another piece of advice that says the best camera you have is the one in your hand, and I like that advice better. So I decided to let my Inner Nag carry on, and I tried to find a way to take some photos without having to walk too far backwards to accommodate the zoom.

Walking backwards with a camera is a problem at The Kelpies, as the storyteller will tell you, because there’s quite a lot of water, and it’s always the adults who fall into the canals in the pursuit of the perfect photograph.

The Kelpies are the largest horse sculpture in the world, and as I experimented with my zoom, I decided it was quite appropriate to fill the frame, to not get them all in, to not take the same shots that adorn the merchandise, because maybe the wrong lens would convey a sense of just how large and impressive these sculptures are.

And then it became a creative game, and I was entranced, and if you know anything about the legend of Scottish Kelpies, you’ll know that this is precisely what they do….