Off-Roading (March 2022)

Off-roading takes place in one part of a local wood. Deep water filled ruts replace woodland tracks, parts of car litter the ground. Occasional there is a whole burnt out vehicle or this case a bonfire of car wheels. 

Take away the personal view about the activity or how it impacts the wood and what is left is scope for abstract photography: burnt colours, rust, dented shapes, some identifiable as car parts and others fully abstract with all the context removed. 

These were some of the results:

Robin Hood Hill (March 2022)

I was surprised to find that this was my first visit to Robin Hood Hill since last June. Normally, I try to get to the main locations at least once a quarter which covers each season, although I don’t do any formal planning in this respect. 

Looking back to previous years, Robin Hood Hill does seem to feature more often in spring when the oilseed crop starts to flower. The vibrant yellows are always an attraction and crop rotation varies the location of the colour each year. This year’s offering will be posted in the next few weeks. 

In the meantime, something strange happened for this selection from March. Somehow I had changed the camera settings from average white balance to 8500K. I think I must have engaged the touch screen unknowingly which accessed the settings and made the change. 

Initially, I didn’t notice, even when processing the first results. I had taken some shots into the late sunlight and expected the results to be warm so it never occurred to make any correction. I even uploaded the results to social media:

I finally realised what had happened when processing the rest of the images and created ‘auto corrected’ versions of the above photos. Basically, the software determines a ‘likely’ white balance from the photo content, with one of  the corrected version shown below:

The corrected version looks more natural when a side-by-side comparison is made, but I don't dislike the original. In fact, it reminds me that all photographs are an interpretation and not necessarily as we see things. Art shows that we have the capacity to accept or even enjoy exaggerated colours - there is no right or wrong.

With that in mind, I went on the guesstimate the colour temperature for the rest of the photographs from this visit. Most ended up somewhere in between the ‘as shot’ and the ‘auto corrected’ versions shown above. These were some of the results:

Evening Light (March 2022)

Last month I posted an ‘evening light’ selection from the same stretch of the Southwell Trail as the following sets of photographs. This might seem unnecessarily repetitive but that is the nature of landscape photography. No two days are exactly the same in terms of light and conditions.

Sometimes I might ask the question, how often is too often for revisiting a photographic location but I generally come up with the same answer: if I don’t get the camera out of the bag, it is too often or the conditions are too similar. 

If I wait for a few weeks, or perhaps a month, the season has moved along, the landscape has changed, the angle of the sunlight is subtlety different and this inspires the photography. 

Occasionally a change provides a totally new opportunity, like the felling of a large sycamore tree on this part of the trail. The gap now allows an uninterrupted a view to a tree in the Lockwell Hill direction. These are the first attempts at this scene:

These are a selection of other photographs taken at the same time as those above plus some from a separate visit a week earlier, with much warmer end of day sunlight: