This panoramic look into Wallingford’s Meridian Playfield is one of the sites/subjects I chose to repeat practically every day since I started my “Wallingford Walk” now 28 months ago. The number of tended locations is now more than 400. By now I rarely add new ones. The complete walk takes about four hours, but this includes visits with friends I come upon and stops at a few health spas like Julia’s bakery and Al’s Tavern.
At the top of this “Fall of Fall” there is a hint of autumn – or many hints with the first fallen leaves — in a three-part pan that was photographed on Oct/12 of this year. In all seven choices or examples the themselves wide-angle parts have been merged and the seams mostly hidden. In the scene below it, which was taken Oct/27 some of the trees are well into the fall season, and thirteen days later, on Nov/2 in the third-from-top pan, a good part of their colorful show has dropped to the floor of the Good Shepherd campus. Four pans down, the gold has turned brown and is hardly noticed in the shadows. The trees are almost bare. This fall show, then, lasted about six weeks. The winter doldrums will endure until early march. We may hope that they will be interrupted by snow, as in five-down on the fifteen of January 2008. The sixth pan from the top gives us a hint of what to expect. Touches of spring are evident from my repeated prospect. For all of these pans I’m propped against a tree at the southeast corner of the playfield. This No. 6 spring scene was taken still in the first full year of my walking – on March 14, 2007. (I began walking my irregular circle – from my front porch and back – in July 2006.) Here the wettest part of the playfield is protected from athletes with a plastic orange net. Finally, in the bottom pan the park is in full summer on July/28 of this year, 2008. The fence has been removed and the field is dry and a bit beaten.
For my own satisfaction I refer to this as Hyde Park, for the big trees remind me of London’s big park, especially when recorded as it is here with 90 degrees of the playfield showing. From these seven views you may get a mistaken notion that this playfield is little used. Soccer players, fetching dogs, and sometimes mordant teens who smoke behind and beneath the distant trees along Meridian Avenue are almost regulars. The dogs surely are regulars. So far I have at least 700 pans from this location leaning against a big tree. From these I will select and “polish” with Photoshop, and any other program that will help, about two hundred of them (I speculate) for a variety of animation that will involve rapid dissolves between the chosen scenes.
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