I plan to repeat the exercise with the other senses next week. I have decided to leave my camera at home so that I can focus on attentiveness, rather than being distracted by the imperative to take photographs and thus resort to visual perception. However, I will take one image for the blog post. I plan to record my thoughts about what I hear, smell, taste, and touch on my phone. I will then write a blog in the present tense of what I observe, hear, feel, and taste depending on the focus of the day. At this stage, I am not intending to write perfect prose but hone my skills in attentiveness which is one of the constructs from the Onion Diagram.

10 Signifier Model of Object-Oriented Photography (Attentiveness) – Alison Price, January 2022
Here are the sounds I recorded on my walk:
Cockerel crowing
Sparrows chattering
Gravel crunching
Clothes rubbing
Wind rumbling and gusting
Trees creaking
Sheep pounding
Apple Watch bleeping
Far off dog barking
Constant drone of the wind
Heather crackling and rustling in the wind
Roar of chainsaw
Babbling burn on its way to the sea
Thundering and fast-flowing burn
Geese trumpeting
Hum of a heat-source pump
Gentle drone of traffic as I return home
Reflections
The focus on one sense was very helpful. I was surprised by how many sounds I heard and recorded. Occasionally, I drifted into visual mode – I recorded that the heather crackling and rustling formed a Mexican wave in the wind! When attending to noises I also recorded that I was surprised not to hear the waves breaking given that my walk skirted the shoreline. However, I realised this was because of the wind direction. I also noted that I had not heard the curlew’s cry.
