Daily Walk Miscellany

More images from a number of recent walks.  The oilseed rape flowering is now over, but the green of the spring wheat is getting intense.  The orange tip butterflies are still on the wing.

 

The Little Wood On The Walk

During any normal spring, I would be spening many hours in the local (or not so local) woods, photographing the spring flowers.  It is probably the thing I miss most during lockdown.  Luckily, my explorations of the fields behind my house led me to find a small patch of woods with a good covering of bluebells and greater stitchwort.  Unlike the woods I normally visit, it is completely unmanaged, meaning lots of undergrowth and no paths.  But I was able access parts of it and take a few handheld images.

 

 

Daily Walk In Infrared

For my daily exercise, I have mainly been roaming the permissive farm tracks that cross the fields a short walk behind my house.  On a lovely sunny day during Easter, I took my IR camera on one of these walks.

 

 

 

Lockdown Projects - Flowers After Pep Ventosa

Spring is my favourite season.  Any normal year, with good weather and the spring flowers in bloom, I would happily spend many long hours in the woods.  Sadly this isn't a normal year.  The great lock-down means the best I can do is bring a few flowers to me.  Fortunately, the over exuberant officers of Cambridgeshire police have yet to get as far as deciding what is non-essential in St Neots Tesco.  So, I've been able to pick up some on my socially distanced shopping trips.  I also have a lovely deep window in the living room that is very handy for tabletop photography.  

Rather than some straight and boring flower portraits, I decided to try to make some images in the style of Pep Ventosa.  For anyone not aware of him, Pep Ventosa is a Spanish photographer who has developed a technique that involves taking multiple pictures of the same image from slightly different angles.  All of the individual shots are then blended together.  The final result is a very impressionist image.  It's a technique I have seen used to great effect by other CCC members.  I have had a couple of attempts whilst out and about without great success.  The ideal subject is something that can be photographed from a full 360 degrees.  This is very easy is achieve when shooting in a home studio.  Set up the camera on a tripod, frame your subject with space either side and then rotate the subject a small amount between each shot.  For a first serious attempt I am quite pleased with results.

Cherry Blossom and Magnolia

These shots were all taken on one afternoon, not far from home, whilst out on my government sanctioned daily exercise.  It was too sunny a day for flower photography, but the blossom looked too good to ignore.  Magnolias are a particular favourite of mine.  I love their bold size and delicate colour, and above all their transience.  More than any other spring flower, Magnolia blossom has a very brief window at it's best, before the wind takes it away.

Porlock Saltmarsh

I don't normally post just one image.  Three is normally my minimum for a blog post.  But, we live in 'interesting' times, and must make do with what we have.  In this case just one shot of the saltmarshes at Porlock.

Having been to Cornwall the previous day, we decided to cross over the other border into Somerset, to explore Porlock.  It was a calmer and greyer day than the previous one, and, as anyone who read the story of the 'Overland Launch' will know, Porlock Weir is a very sheltered harbour.  This all meant that the sea offered little in the way of interesting wave motion images.  But the main focus of our visit were the salt marshes and in particular a patch of petrified trees. These proved a little tricky to find and even trickier to get to.  By the time we reach the trees, there was little time available to get some shots.  This was the best shot I managed.

Bude Sea Pool

These images were taken at the start of the month, before all the current restrictions.

I was in Devon for a few days visiting my friend Vic.  Sea pools always make good subjects for long exposure and we knew there was a good example in Bude, so that was the first mission.  We were on site a few hours before high tide and were able to track the tide as it came in and topped the pool.

We had chosen a day of 'challenging' weather, a strong, and frankly bitter, wind with alternating sun and 'sharp' showers.  Despite doing my best to hold down my tripod, the wind proved too much for most the of the >30 second exposures.  I had a lot more success with exposures of around 1 to 2 seconds.  I particularly enjoyed capturing the movement of the water over the broad pool wall.