A Path To Nowhere - Viviers Sur Rhone, France

Every once and awhile you'll take a photo that you really don't expect to have unexpected nuances. Where what you thought you saw was more than what you really saw. For me, this was such a picture. While on a recent trip to Southern France (Viviers Sur Rhone) I turned a corner in this very old, very beautiful French town (only about 7,000 in population, but over 2,000 years of history) and there it was, the"Allee Du Rhone" (Alley of Rhone)....

It had been very cold and rainy that day (December 30, 2008) and the sky was very overcast and gloomy. The streets were wet and pooled with icy water. Because I chose not to bring my DSLR on this trip, I only had my trusty point and shoot (Sony Cyber-shot DCSW150 (8.1 Mega Pixel camera). It didn't seem to matter though. I took this photo at 1/100 of a second using an ISO setting of 100. Because point and shoot camera lens are very different than DSLR lens, the setting was F3 with a focal lengthe of 3 (which would be somewhere in the 50 mm range of a DSLR. No additional contrast or satruation were set (Landscape - Auto Exposure)... As I said, just a simple point and shoot. Although I prefer to shoot with my DSLR, I'm not that much of a photography purest when it comes to which camera I use. Which ever is more convienent and less cumbersom is my choice for the shoot.

The reason I say this photograph has unexpected nuances is because the longer I looked at it the more drawn into it I became. Little odd things started to appear that I had not noticed when I was physically on this little tree lined alley that lead from the Rhone River to the center of the town. The longer I gazed the photo actually had my mind mentally turning the picture and giving the photo a different look and feel. The photo above is actually a flipped version of the original photo (which I posted below)...

I don't know, maybe the original says it's not that dark of a day and it was only the standing water that made the trees dark. The flipped version really reflected more of how the day looked and felt. No matter what direction the photo is in, the feelings I experience change with each shift in position. What ever is going on, it's photos like this that cause me to see the world differently than if I was just walking along and not observing changes around me. Years ago this would just have been another street; today, it's a story.