View finder

Photography and words: Jonathan Camí

I like autumn. I like when the days get shorter, the weather gets crisper and the beaches lose their crowds. I like when the relentless heat and the harsh sunlight are over. It’s this season when I most enjoy just walking around, with my camera ready to shoot anything interesting that crosses my path, and there is always something worth capturing when you wander around Paddington in autumn.

I love roaming around the neighbourhood when the paths are covered with colourful rugs. Some are yellow, some are red and some are mixed with all the gradients in between. They are knitted by the annual leaves of introduced trees, an urban landscape that brings back my overseas childhood.

Oddly, some side streets, some laneways, some unique stone houses, remind me of my parents’ town, a traditional little village just a few kilometres north of Barcelona.

On a typical Sunday afternoon in Paddington, there are no souls to be seen around, no traffic, no hurry to go anywhere. The quietness allows me to walk in the middle of the road, careless, concentrating on just capturing a nice picture. I can look up without being blinded by the sun and the tree canopies don’t cover the views.

It’s at this time when I can take a photograph from a different point of view, sometimes more interesting than the landscape I always see when I walk on the footpath during a weekday.

When the summer is over, shorter days are a gift for photographers; the light goes down in a lower angle, filling the streets with interesting textures. This is the time when it becomes a pleasure to be a vagabond in my own neighbourhood.

I feast my eyes with the beautiful autumn colours, enjoying a peaceful walk and remembering a long gone easier life, as a child, on a distant continent, while doing what I love to do, for work and pleasure — nothing other than photographing the beauty of this world.