(from the 1973 compilation album Relics)

Heeeeeeeeeeeeere's Findlaaaaaaay!

Even before the Challenge started, I've wanted to do this shot - as a young lad, I remember listening my eldest brother's Pink Floyd LPs and being completely bewitched by the song titles, but especially by this one. To a shy retiring (honest!) prepubescent 12 year old, these titles conjured up all sorts of images and emotions about the adult world, but "CWTA,E" was by far the strangest, spookiest and downright menacing...and therefore perhaps the one that stuck the most in my mind.

And sure enough, right from Day one I've been on a personal crusade to get this shot right - goodness knows how many test pics I've taken, got fed up with and ditched. Rubbish SPs; odd angles; old bedsheets; off-camera flash, no off-camera flash; B&W, colour...I just couldn't get it right. I was REALLY hacked off on Friday night after another bout of 4th Division shots and had actually decided that enough was enough, that I couldn't get it right and that I should just jolly well hang up the axe, when my daughter said 'Dad, why don't you take a picture of Finn beside the window? He'll look like a silhouette with the light coming in...'

I was stunned! Absolutely stunned! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry*...laugh coz she'd given me the answer...cry because a 14 year old with no photographic experience (no disrepect Naomi!) was able to not only suggest a good pose, but could also understand enough about light to know that shooting up to the window would give a silhouette...something her 40something dad with more than 20 years pfaffing about with a camera hadn't managed to work out in almost four weeks...out of the mouths of babes...

So, with renewed vigour and a freshly formatted CF card, I swallowed my pride, switched to spot metering and got the lad to look suitably menacing in a contre jour position. In contrast to the hundred of test shots I taken, I nailed this is four!! Mad or what!?

Sunday 29th's Shiningly-scary-and-penultimate entry to the Challenge; click here for other Floydian adventurers this month


*I actually poured another large glass of Chianti :o)