Capturing beauty

It’s hard to take a good photograph on a cameraphone. Sometimes, if the light is right and the hand is steady, it’s possible to capture an approximate likeness of reality, but most pictures disappoint. Last night on the way home I ran past some trees in Camden that were a supremely green kind of green and I wanted to capture them for this blog, as I knew I wouldn’t be able to describe them using words.

Sadly the clouds had thickened overhead and the picture doesn’t show the looming flourescence of the leaves. They just look like ordinary leaves, not something to make you stop in your tracks and fumble with your phone in an attempt to fix them in the memory.

Oh well, the photo does show one of my favourite streets to run down, so I thought I’d put it up anyway. It’s a short, wide street in Camden between the Park and tube and I like peering into the little shops and pubs and imagining who lives in the houses and flats. I have got into some odd habits when running this route home – I look forward to certain streets, trees, gardens or shop windows – even patches of particularly smooth pavement have been known to give me pleasure.