Southwell Trail Fields

Having separated the ash trees and my oak tree composition from the Southwell Trail autumn photographs, I find myself stuck with a format. Instead my normal week by week posts I am now working on themed posts showing how certain aspects of the trail change over the season.

This particular selection of photographs covers the compositions I make from the Southwell Trail looking across the fields to the Hexgreave Estate, Nottinghamshire. In all these scenes it is hard to avoid the power lines and pylons. In the past, this would have prevented my from taking these shots but gradually I have accepted them as part of the landscape and I now include pylons, poles and lines in the compositions - sometimes they even become the main subject of the image.

The first composition features a small group of trees which I later crop to a letterbox format. I tend to include the pylon as this helps make sense of the power lines that run across the scene. The sequence covers a couple of weeks in November where the autumn colours gradually diminish as the leaves started to fall:

Depending on the light I might shift the composition to the left or right of these trees and/or zoom in into the detail:

I see this type of photography as simple photography, which of course, it is, but there is something more to the activity than the technical elements of a camera. It is about engaging with the local landscape and gaining an appreciation of my immediate environment. I am sure there are many other ways to achieving the same thing but I find photography works for me. If I ever feel down about anything I can always be uplifted by the subtle changes in light and colour along the trail:

Although power lines and pylon feature in all the above pictures, these are a couple of examples where they are definitely the subject of the composition: