Meet one of my favourite beverages:
Kilkenny on my kitchen table, Canon G2 digital, May 2002
(click on image for a larger view)This is a glass of imported Kilkenny Draught Irish Cream Ale. When sunlight streams through the glass, it presents one of the most beautiful hues of dark amber known to man.
Catching this aesthetic, enticing look proved one of my hardest challenges when I first started digital photography. I didn't know how to light it and then capture the essence of the beverage. My attempts were always flawed.
One day I came in from some yard work and opened a Kilkenny. I put it on the table and the sun hit it and I thought, yes, this time I'll get you. I fetched my Canon G2, set it to macro mode, used the widest angle of the zoom range, and handheld seven shots, varying the angle and the distance from the glass. This one was my favourite because it caught both the Kilkenny and the fresh May flowers Marion had put on the window ledge.
I knew this photo was successful when I showed it to my workmates and they all asked to have a copy to use as their Windows wallpaper! It's been my most requested photo ever.
Although I'm not a big drinker, I love a good brew every now and then. I love the taste and love the sense of history I get every time I drink one. A beverage as old as civilization, beer drives men to eloquence:
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy
-- Benjamin FranklinBut in a curious twist, when I have a beer I often find myself fantasying not about the beer hall, but the mead hall. The Nordic warrior-heroes fresh from battle, or about to go to battle. Aside from collecting rings, uttering oaths, and quaffing mead, there wasn't much else going back then.
This life is wonderfully captured in the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. If you haven't yet run across it, let me recommend to you Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, by Seamus Heany. This recent translation reads beautifully and the book is bilingual, Anglo-Saxon on one side and modern English on the other on facing pages. Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragon and its hoard. A powerful, epic story reflecting the zeitgeist of the 8th century.
Cheers!
(16-Sep-2003, Revised 16-Jun-2004)
www.NorthernJourney.com -- gene@wilburn.ca