Travel Tuesday : In Sharp Focus

Some of my early memories include ripe wheat fields.  The five acre field outside my childhood bedroom window was often planted in hard red winter wheat.  The kind milled to make the flour that pasta is made from.  I was disappointed as a child to hear that our wheat was used to make macaroni, and not bread.  Looking at is now, in sharper focus, what we were raising is a premium grain, used to make some of the most wonderful foods of modern cuisine.  

A ripe wheat field is a difficult thing to photograph using a camera with autofocus.   There are so many sharp edges, that the focus is on a linear band, leaving the foreground and distance in a blur. I like this.  Even if it was an accident.  There is a YouTuber that urges photographers to not delete the mistakes, there is gold in them sometimes.  

From a sensory perspective there is the field before harvest, something you should never walk in, trampled wheat is lost wheat, then there is the fresh cut stubble field.  The stalks are left 6-10 inches high, they snap when you walk over them.  The smell stays with you for a lifetime.  The last time I saw a fresh stubble field, was in Normandy one summer.  Probably 100 acres, freshly harvested, the combine was still in the corner of the field.  It was after dinner, but still daylight in mid summer.  And over dinner I had encountered my first bottle of Norman Cider.  I went for a walk in the field, crunch, crunch, crunch, then collapsed in bed for the sleep of delightfully drunk.  The experience stays in sharp focus, the joys of travel.