After what seems like an eternity I have finally won my 11th Photo of the day on the front page of the Digitalimagecafe.com website. My winning entry is in the Scenic category.

This is a significant milestone for me as it is my first win in the main POTD section. In order to qualify for entry into the main contest you first have to have achieved 10 wins in the introductory "Appetisers" section. My 10 winning entries in the Appetisers section can be seen here.

The standard of photography in this daily contest is quite exceptional so getting a win is a big morale booster especially when one is struggling to find inspiration.

I had a feeling this weekend could well be my last opportunity this year to photograph an autumnal scene. The weather here has been particularly fine recently and therefore cannot possibly last for much longer.

So with this in mind I decided to visit the National Trust's Stourhead Gardens in Wiltshire. This particular attraction was recommended to me by a friend who had recently paid a visit there and enthused over the spectacular setting and colour of the trees.

(Click all images for a larger view)

Since my SatNav had malfunctioned a few days ago and not having a decent road map to hand I resorted to the Multimap.com website to obtain my route. This online facility is extremely helpful and easy to use. You simply enter your starting postcode, the destination postcode and up pops all the information you could possibly need; an over-detailed list of instructions to reach your destination, route map, distance, duration and ..... the carbon footprint of the journey!!!

So for those of you who are interested these photographs produced about 30kg of carbon into the earth's atmosphere due to my return trip in a car with a medium sized diesel engine. Perhaps I should quote this figure for all my pictures.

If I really cared about such things all I could take pictures of would be my back garden which, although is very nice thanks to my wife's stirling efforts, does not quite match the splendour of places like Stourhead.

I suppose I could have planted a tree to offset my "carbon footprint" but I really don't think I could have found the space for it.

Well it's been far too long since my last blog. The lack of material is mostly due to my being totally absorbed in the Rugby World Cup.

So just to try and get back into the habit of posting again here are a few recent images taken since September.

The Great Dorset Steam Fair 2007 (Click all images for a larger view)

Flying Saucers

Sunset at Portland Bill

And finally this one taken at the Hartland Peninsular on a recent trip to North Devon.

Hartland Point Lighthouse

Norfolk is a region I have never been to before now, so this bank holiday we headed off in the motorhome to have a look around. Our original intention was to start the tour in the Great Yarmouth area and over the extended weekend work our way northwards along the coast, moving from one campsite to the next, and ending up around Wells-next-the-Sea.

I normally leave the booking of campsites until the week before only to find I have to do a bit more ringing around because our first choice sites have already booked up with the bank holiday crowds. So this time I decided to be premptive and began the process of booking sites 3 weeks ahead thinking this should give me plenty of time to beat the crowds. As it turned out, despite my foresight, I found suitable sites (read cheap) to be in even shorter supply than normal. I guess this must be an indication of the popularity of Norfolk. Consequently I had to resort to booking two sites in Suffolk which, although is a lovely part of the world, was going in the opposite direction to what we had planned.

The journey up to Norfolk went quite well, all the anticipated traffic holdups seemed to be in the opposite direction, one section of the M25 tailed back about 10 miles. We hit a slight bottleneck in the Elvedon forest but that only delayed us by about 15 minutes. The fine weather we had been promised didn't appear instead it began to drizzle. Given how bad the summer has been this year I began to wonder if this would turn out to be a typically wet bank holiday despite all predictions to the contrary.

Eventually we arrived at our first site in Burgh Castle, just outside Great Yarmouth, in good time for to go for a walk and explore the area. I brought some ordnance survey maps with me and could see there was the remains of a Roman fort nearby. I say nearby, because I estimated it was only about 1 mile away looking at the map and convinced my daughter that she could manage a 2 mile stroll. My estimate however turned out to be considerably short and in fact it was more like 1.75 miles. So what should have been a 2 mile walk became a 3.5 mile hike. Boy did I get some grief for that especially as a significant part of it was along narrow roads without pavements!

View from the Roman fort at Burgh Castle (Click all images for a larger view)

The next day the much anticipated, fine weather arrived and we headed down to Southwold in Suffolk and spent most of the day there. Southwold is quite an upmarket seaside resort notable for the lighthouse positioned amongst the residential houses. There is also a pier with a small amusement arcade, but apart from that Southwold does not have the usual, tacky paraphenalia associated with other seaside holiday resorts.

Southwold Lighthouse.

The Sole Bay Inn.

Southwold beach huts

We noticed that many of the towns and villages in East Anglia had some quite ornate and colourful name plaques. The most impressive of the ones we saw was at Beccles, this was a fully three dimensional scene of some event associated with the town. Unfortunately because I was trying to cope with my satnav system which at that point seemed determined to send me the wrong way down one way streets, I didn't manage to stop and take a photo. As an example of what I'm trying to describe, I have posted Southwold's name plaque below. This commemorates the battle of Sole Bay which took place in 1672 between the English and French navies on one side and the Dutch navy on the other. Yes you did read that correctly - the English and the French fighting on the same side. Isn't history fascinating? Although I did notice that in this depiction the French navy is conspicuous by it's absence, perhaps at this point in the battle it was lunchtime.

A scene from the battle of Sole Bay; 1672, around about lunch time

The Sunday was somewhat wasted as I didn't want to venture too far into Norfolk because we then had to travel back into Suffolk for that evening's campsite destination. This is where my attempt at forward planning didn't pan out.

In the morning we visited the Minsmere RSPB reserve. I didn't go in myself as birdwatching is what my wife Ali and Charlotte particularly like doing. The report back from Minsmere wasn't too impressive however. Although a Heron and a Marsh Harrier were spotted nothing else of particular interest had been observed.

Later on in the afternoon we visited How Hill. I wanted to have a look at the windpump there and in particular try and take a picture from the same vantage point as one that I particularly like by a photograher called Tom Mackie. I was never going to be able to emulate the image taken by Tom but I thought this might at least serve as a recce operation for the future. When we eventually found this place it turned out that it was not possible to reach the spot I wanted without a boat! I had to content myself with a much poorer image of the back of the windpump from the wrong side of the river. I haven't shown that one by the way, it's that bad. Mental note to self for the future - research locations more thouroughly. I have since read that Tom lives quite locally to How Hill and is on very friendly terms with the reed cutter there, so I presume that is how he manages to take his images from what turns out to be a very difficult place to get to. It just goes to show why the best landscape photographs are usually taken by the people who live closest to the scene.

Anyway the day wasn't a complete waste of time, after all what is a visit to Norfolk if you don't at least drove through the village with the stupidest name, in this case the award goes to Repps-with-Bastwick!!

On Monday we had to cram in all the places we had planned to take in the previous day starting with Horsey Windpump. We then spent a little time on the beach at Sea Palling where there are some impressive sea defences that have since become huge sand dunes. It struck me while there how similar to Holland Norfolk is. It's mostly flat, has loads of windmills (or more accurately; windpumps) and there are dykes to keep the sea out in some places.

Horsey Windpump

The next port of call on our whistle stop tour was Happisburgh lighthouse which is the only independantly owned, operational lighthouse in the UK. I noticed a for sale sign at the entrance to the road leading up to the lighthouse. I don't know if it is the land that is for sale or the lighthouse itself. The coast line around Happisburgh is rapidly being eroded and some of the houses there are only meters away from the cliff edge. Eventually the lighthouse itself will be threatened by falling into the sea. I wonder if the relationship between the decline in the value of a property and the distance it is from a rapidly eroding coastline is linear or exponential?

Happisburgh Lighthouse - New owner must leave lights on at night!

Cley-next-the-sea was the next village on the list and finally caught us up with our original schedule. The Norfolk wildlife trust have a particularly impressive visitors centre in which we found ample parking for a couple of hours while Ali and Charlotte went bird watching again and I scouted out the village with a view to researching possible future photo opportunities.

Cley windmill - Yes folks! It's a windmill this time, not a windpump.

The bird watching was far more fruitful than Minsmere by all accounts with reports of a multitude of different types of waders, ducks and geese being spotted by my "twitchers".

On Tuesday morning we had just enough time to drop in to Wells-next-the-Sea before heading home. There is a very picturesque beach to the north of the town which is enhanced by the chain of colourful huts lining the beach. I tried my hand at another panoramic which was slightly less successful than the previous day. Not having the tripod with me meant I was unable to maintain the horizontal pan line hence the two beach huts just right of centre touching the upper frame.

Wells-next-the-sea - Panoramic

More beach huts at Wells-next-the-Sea - Single frame

That pretty much wraps up the account of our Norfolk tour. We saw rather more of Suffolk than we had intended and I would have preferred to have spent more time on the Norfolk coast. The trip home wasn't quite as smooth as the outward journey either. I'd hoped that by leaving it until Tuesday to come home we could avoid the inevitable bank holiday traffic jams, but no, the good old M25 saw to that. It took at least an hour to get between junction 22 and 19!!

Oh well, at least I have some nice "snaps" to show for it all, and as I am constantly reminding my crew of two; "I always take you to the best places".

Dungeness is a shingle headland located on the Romney Marsh along the south east coast of England about halfway between Hastings and Folkstone. Apart from it's unique geology, and wildlife, which is protected through various conservation designations it is also, rather incongruously, the site for two nuclear power stations.  Apparently the warm water from the outflow of the power station is partly responsible for attracting many of the wild birds that flourish there. 

Click all images for a larger view.

I first became interested in visiting this place after watching an episode of  the BBC series "A Digital Picture of Britain" which aired in 2006. The premise of the series was to introduce professional photographers who currently only use film, to the digital medium.  In this particular episode the photographer Nick Denziger chose Dungeness as his subject on which to try out his borrowed digital SLR. 

Dungeness - Main Street?

Watching the programme I was struck by the raw and somewhat bleak beauty of the area. This aura is enhanced by the collection of ramshackle cottages that are dotted along the unmaintained road running through the estate giving it a somewhat desolate feel. One of these homes (Prospect Cottage) was previously owned by a film director, Derek Jarmin. Before his death Jarmin created a garden out of the shingle using local flora and various pieces of flotsam he found lying on the beach.

Prospect Cottage

The first chance I had to pay a visit came during a recent tour of East Sussex and Kent that my family and I made during a very wet bank holiday weekend in our motorhome. It was a miserable afternoon with slate grey skies and threatening rain and we had just finished bird watching at a nearby RSPB reserve. As the Dungeness estate was only another couple of minutes further down the road it wasn't difficult to persuade my two wives (see post entitled "I sometimes wonder why I bother" below for an explanation) to make the short detour to have a quick nosey. Despite the weather, indeed it may even have been because of the weather, I was not disappointed with the decision. Dungeness was everything I imagined it to be and made up my mind there and then to come back on my own with the camera sometime. Fortunately for me my two wives were also captivated by the unusual ambience. I don't think this place is everyone's cup of tea so it could easily have gone the other way and I would then have been met by a very vocal chorus of disapproval, mainly from mini wife!

The Old Lifeboat House (Nuclear power station in the background)

My next opportunity to pay a revisit came as soon as the following weekend. Clear skies and a promising weather forecast was all the prompting I needed to demand a 48 hour pass from the boss (i.e. wife No. 1). This trip was also going to be my first experience of "wild camping" which is basically camping overnight in the motorhome at any available spot where you are not likely to be disturbed. The advantage of this is; a) I can be closer to where I want to photograph; b) I can move off whenever I want, unlike on an official campsite where curfews are applied for the comfort of the other campers. Oh yes and; c) it's free.

 

A creation from flotsam and jetsom in a garden.

A typical Dungeness cottage.

Some of the Dungeness residents are trawlermen. Their fishing boats are hauled up onto the shingle bank each day as they have been for centuries along this part of the coast.

Three sisters.

The Julie T

Once beyond their useful life the old fishing boats and sheds seem to be simply left to rot adding to the strange, apocalyptic feel. Given the modern materials that the current fleet are made from however, I cannot imagine that this practice will be allowed to continue, or at least I hope it won't.

Beyond economic repair.

C'est la vie.

On the second evening I plucked up the courage to pitch up on a private road that led directly down to the beach. There was a notice at the head of the road warning that the gate could be locked at any time. Throughout the day I had watched other people with motorhomes and who seemed to have the same idea, so I figured I was at the very least in good company. Besides if this gate was locked behind me it was only a matter of perhaps a couple of hours before it would be opened again anyway. Initially I was quite pleased with my decision to risk this. It was a beautiful, peaceful evening, I was right next to the beach and had a great view of the sea.

There is a police vehicle that regularly patrols around the area as part of the nuclear power station security measures. So I was half expecting that they would move me on. However the police drove past a couple of times and took no notice of me so I was well and truly set for a quiet night. Or so I thought.

Unfortunately what I hadn't reckoned on was the number of people who come here on a weekend to fish throughout the night. So after nightfall it wasn't long before I was listening to a very loud and continuous commentary from some, obviously deaf, fishermen on which species of fish they had just landed. After about 20 minutes of this I drove the mile or so back to the RSPB carpark as I had done the previous night in order to get a peacful sleep. I don't know what it is about fishermen but they do seem to cause me a lot of grief one way or another.

Hopefully this blog has given at least a  flavour of this unique corner of the south coast. As with all landscape photography you do need to keep revisiting your favourite locations at different times of the year in order to discover the best images. Watch this space!

Landscape photography is what interests me the most although I can hardly claim to be a dedicated practitioner of the genre, at least not yet. Being at your chosen location about an hour before sunrise or for an hour after sunset is the norm. In the summer of course this can be as early as 3am or as late as 11pm. And then there's the travelling time to consider. It is for this reason that I prefer to get away on my own in the motorhome so I can get close to where I intend to photograph and please myself what time I go to bed and get up. That way I have a better chance of catching the best light at minimum inconvenience to myself or my family. On one occasion recently I spent a couple of nights wild camping in Dungeness which is about 150 miles away from my home (that will be a subject for a future blog entry).

Abandoned fishing boat - Dungeness. (Click for a larger view)

I do however have to take my hat off to Joe Cornish. Joe is one of Britain's most respected and talented landscape photographers whose work I particularly admire. I recently read in his book "First Light - A Landscape Photographer's Art", how he once drove from his home in Yorkshire for 5 hours to Stranraer in Scotland. From there he took a 2 hour ferry ride to Larne in Northern Ireland and then drove for another one and a half hours to Whitepark Bay on the north-facing coast of Antrim. Once there he spent three hours photographing the coastline in the evening light. As if that wasn't enough he then got up the following morning at 3:45am, after only 3 hours sleep, to continue taking pictures of the area. Now that is dedication to your art; or complete and utter madness, depending on which side of the fence you are on.

I read this particular passage in the book out to my wife in the hope that it would go some way towards vindicating what she considers to be my disctinctly odd behaviour. Needless to say "she who must be amused" - wasn't. Well I suppose I can take some heart in the knowledge that I am not alone. The fact that Cornish does it professionally is not in the least bit significant in my opinion.

This weekend I paid a visit to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. I have intended to visit this place for some time as a kind of pilgrimage. For this is where William Henry Fox Talbot developed the calotype process from which modern photography developed (pardon the pun).

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Talbot engaged in photographic experiments before 1839, when Louis Daguerre exhibited his pictures taken by the sun. After Daguerre's discovery was announced (without details), Talbot showed his four-year old pictures at the Royal Institution on 25 January 1839. Within a fortnight, he freely communicated the technical details of his photogenic drawing process to the Royal Society. Daguerre would not reveal the manipulatory details of his process until August. In 1841 Talbot announced his discovery of the calotype, or talbotype, process. This process reflected the work of many predecessors, including John Herschel. Talbot's original contributions included the concept of a negative from which many positive prints can be made (although the terms negative and positive were coined by Herschel), and the use of gallic acid for developing the latent image. In 1842, for his photographic discoveries, which are detailed in his The Pencil of Nature (1844), he received the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society.

 
The earliest known surviving negative is of a lattice window in Lacock Abbey and is housed at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford.

Possibly the first photograph, how many taken since?

Although there was a small museum dedicated to Fox Talbot there weren't as many exhibits as I had imagined there would be, so in that respect I was perhaps a little disappointed. I guess I will need to go to the National Museum of Photography in Bradford at some stage.

I was unable to photograph the actual window from inside the house so I had to content myself with taking my picture from outside. It was extremely busy and I had to wait for some time in order to get a shot without any tourists spoiling the composition. I should point out that I don't consider myself to be a tourist, I of course am an artist undertaking research.

The Lattice Window
The cloisters at Lacock Abbey have been used recently in the Harry Potter movies. They featured in the "Chamber of Secrets" in the scene where Harry frees Dobby from servitude to Lucius Malfoy.

Where's Dobby?

One other thing I learned: Apart from being used to steady a camera when you don't want to use a tripod - monopoles also make handy walking sticks for 11 year old children who happen to have twisted their ankles! I didn't take a picture of that, Charlotte would never forgive me.

Last year for our summer holiday I hired a motorhome and took my family to Wales. I have never been to Wales sightseeing before and I was amazed at the number of castles this country had.

On arrival at Caerphilly I was immediately impressed by the huge castle in the centre of the town complete with a moat and drawbridge. After lunch I left my two wives to explore the inner castle while I set out on my own, in peace, to find a good vantagepoint from which to try and capture an image of this magnificent structure.

I don't really like photographing scenic views in the middle the day especially in the height of summer, the light is directly overhead and tends to be unflattering and too harsh for the subject. When I'm on holiday with the family however, this is usually the only time I can practice my art. Undeterred by the light, I walked around the moat until I came to a park from which I thought I would at least get a reasonable "record" shot.

I found an area just off the main path leading through the park that looked promising and started to set up. I go through pretty much the same routine whenever I prepare to take this type of picture. I set up my camera on the tripod, I attached the remote shutter release cable, composed the scene in the viewfinder, made sure the camera was level, checked the exposure, recomposed, double-checked the exposure and so on. After some time I was ready to open the shutter when a local passed by on the path behind me and said, in a very broad Welsh accent....

"Why don't you just buy a postcard?"

Now I did immeadiately see the funny side of the question but at the same time I also felt slightly crestfallen. Not only could I not at the time think of a witty retort but here I was with £ X,000's worth of camera equipment in front of me when I could have saved a fortune and simply spent 50p in the local newsagent. The postcards in the newsagent were in fact infinitely better pictures than the one I took, but then they had been taken in much better light.

Should have bought a postcard!

By the way to any of you who picked up on my comment above about my "two wives" I should perhaps clear that up. My first wife is the lady to whom I have been happily married for 14 years. My second wife is in fact my 11-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who somehow manages to henpeck me more than my official wife. Hence I consider myself to be owned by two wives. You know, I never did understand the Mormons.

I went back to Portland Bill this weekend. There were several things I had in mind to do, one of which was to attempt to re-photograph an image I had taken about 4 weeks previously. See below;

Click the image for a larger view

I was initially quite pleased with this picture. I had deliberately set out to use the water in the rock pool to lead the eye through the image to Pulpit Rock in the distance. I also managed (more by accident than anything else) to catch a token wave crashing on the rocks in the middle ground. But when I viewed the result on the PC at home later that evening I was kicking myself for not thinking at the time to use a polarising filter. This would have reduced the reflections on the main tidal pool and so provide even more foreground interest.

It is a well known fact in nature and landscape photography that you can never take the same image on two different days, or even later on the same day. Something is always going to be different, the light, the sky, weather etc but I thought it was worth a go as I was curious to see how much of a difference using the polariser would make.

Fortunately when I arrived this morning the tide was out so that was one variable less to worry about. It was about the same time in the morning as when the original was taken so the light was sort of similar. The weather was more or less the same but this time there was absolutely no cloud which was a shame because blue skies are boring, still you can’t have everything I suppose.

So I started to set up ready to recreate my “nearly masterpiece”. I was just about to start taking pictures when a man with a fishing rod walked into shot about 50 meters away. "Why do these things happen to me", I thought. "I mean can’t he see I’m trying to take an award winning photo here?"

The fisherman looked around into the sea as if trying to decide if this spot was going to be fruitful. "Come on mate!" I thought in the hope he may be telepathic, "There's no point in hanging around here you won't catch anything on this side of the rock - go around the corner there's a good chap". No such luck; he casts his line into the sea and in less than a minute he's landed a decent sized sea bass. So that's it, he's here to stay now.

At this point I was tempted to pack up and move on to somewhere else instead. But then I decided to at least try out the polariser on the rockpool reflections. Besides I could clone him out in photoshop afterwards. After a couple of shots it dawned on me that having a human figure in the compostition actually provided a stronger focal point than just the rock on it's own. The figure also gives a sense of scale which had been lacking previously. I of course congratulated myself for brilliantly pre-visualising this scene and continued to try and capture a wave crashing onto the rocks as I had done before. 

In the end I think this image is a stronger composition due to the fisherman as well as the enhanced foreground interest. 

(Click the image for a larger view)

Now all I have to do is get to the same rock pool at low tide, remember the polariser, wait for a fisherman to come into shot, and make sure there are some interesting clouds in the sky!

I had no intention of making an entry today; I’m only aiming to make maybe two or three a week at most. I do, or rather I should, have better things to be getting on with. Besides, trying to keep the content fresh and interesting is going to be hard enough without forcing myself to commit some words of wit and wisdom to blog.
 

Having said that I suddenly remembered Alex Bernasconi’s website and thought it would be remiss of me not to make some mention of what I find to be utterly incredible wildlife photography. If I don’t do it now I’ll probably forget to do it later, so click the link http://www.alexbernasconi.com/home.htm and be amazed!