32 Exposure BEN EGERTON Regrets; yes, many. None as deep as that time after I didn’t stop for a photo of four life-sized resin dinosaurs in the trailer of a truck parked on the Hutt Road. Sure I have excuses: the dog was desperate for a walk—she’d been shut in all day; there was nowhere safe to pull over; I could catch them on my way home. It was hard to identify the species, what with only their top halves showing, and me lacking a background in palaeontology. The dinosaurs stood two abreast and two deep, as they would have on the ark had Noah been instructed to include them, and a taut faun tarpaulin extended from the cab end of the trailer to the shoulders of the inner pair— lending them a look in part startled apology/part superhero/part Christo artwork. Even though that dinosaur horse has long bolted, I’m still shutting the photography stable door at every opportunity. Only this last week I’ve framed an uncracked clutch of de-nested blackbirds’ eggs, windswept leaves gathered to the shape of Australia, an oil stain so vivid as to make a fake of the Turin Shroud. But I’m yet to take anything to correct my transgression of not having snapped those semi-exposed reproductions, those plastic sentinels of the Campanian. For after walking the dog, I turned for home. But no, they were not.
