Something To Refer To.

We went to visit my sister yesterday, to celebrate, a tad belatedly, her 30th wedding anniversary with the rest of the family.  Being half an hour early, we detoured to Leven, meaning to enjoy watching the water sparkle in the sunlight, which we did.   On the way to the house, though, Robin stopped to buy some rolls from a particularly good baker, and I spotted this...

I admit, it's not an obvious photograph to take, but then, I'm the girl who used to get down on her hands and knees to take photographs of roots and stones... There's a lot of texture in this image, and, sadly, more reflections than I wanted; didn't think to roll down the car window.  What I was after, in actual fact, was the cracks in the stone underneath the sign, the one to the left of the image in particular.  That said, I like the whole of it, it's interesting, I think, though I'm unlikely to do anything with the whole thing, really.

The main problem is that this was taken using a phone: you never have your camera with you when you need it.  Given that I have two, perhaps I should take to keeping one in the car.  So the image is small to start with, and it starts getting a bit hairy when I try to crop down the image to study the crack itself:

At this size, they're okay....ish... a tiny bit of pixellation.  Smaller, though, and we get this:

Still fairly adequate.  But looking at a smaller area, the bit I'm really interested in...

well... I dare say a photographer would just delete it.  I, on the other hand, think it's fab.  Firstly, it suggests ways of rendering it, like pointillism, that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.  Secondly, it isn't my only reference; I can look at the larger images to get a crisper look at what's going on.  Finally, I didn't take the photograph as a photograph, an end in itself.  I took it as reference, to remind me of what was there, to use as the basis for textile work and/or drawing.  As such, the smallest of them, and the one we might usually discard, is probably best.