Cold day, from a warm room

I have always liked photographs with something wrong. A technical fault can be a form of Roland Barthes's "punctum," the point where you, the viewer, puncture a photograph's illusions and start finding meaning. I find that process just as real with my own pictures as anyone else's.

The faults start with my accidentally mis-setting the white balance. Oh well. But then, there was nothing I could do about the lights behind me, reflecting. Nor did I avoid my usual fault of ignoring the levelling line in my camera's viewfinder and taking a picture off-plumb.

But, "What? Me? Worry?"

A few changes and I get something that I would not have had if there were no faults.

It was cold out, at the end of the day, with the sky starting to clear to enable the temperature to drop another ten degrees Celcius beyond what it was. This is the kind of weather when we sometimes start seeing slob ice forming in the harbour and, although it cannot be seen here, there was a little just to the right of, and half-way up that white building. This morning, after a night of minus sixteen C, there's probably some more.