1st July 2010
The entrance to Leh is a work of intricacy and a difficult one to photograph because you usually pass through it in a vehicle, not on foot, so you have to shoot from a moving vehicle; also, there is continuous traffic moving in and out...you have to wait for some calm to get an unobstructed view of the arch...and before you have got it right, you have left it behind... so much like so many good things in life.
As we drove towards Hemis, the spectacle of spaces stretching till the end of the world and rising into a border of mountains had lost its sharpness to the wooly mist that hung about them.
But not for long.
Those striations! I spent most of my camera on these wonderful striations.
Uniform strokes of a paint brush.
Layers of dry fruit in a sand-brown cake.
Hard jagged rock that will kill if you touch.
The lush patch of green was a novelty.
I hadn’t even imagined it possible in this setting, during the last visit.
That purple streak on the mountain was the finishing stroke of the brush, just to break the monotony of brown and beige. Without that, the picture wouldn’t have been the same.
