Summer Greens (June 2020)

Forest photography in the summer months is all about ‘green’. At times the colour can be overwhelming making composition more difficult. In these circumstances it is far too easy to make quick judgements and reject many shots before clicking the shutter.

To avoid this, and to keep the photography experience positive, I have learned to record every shot that I line up and defer all judgements to the process stage.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee good results but it does mean that there is some material to work with - even if that is pressing the delete button!

More often than not though, I do find images that I like, as I did with this selection from Clipstone and Sherwood Forests towards the end of June...starting with a set of backlit oak and beech leaves:

And, these were some of the forest scenes picking out the colour in the canopy, the branching patterns of the trees and views along the forest paths:

Stallon Pond (June 2020)

Two visits to Stallon Pond three months apart. The first was in March, a week or so prior to the virus lockdown, and then most recently in mid-June. It feels that so much has happened during this time when in actual fact most of it has been characterised by inactivity....locked up at home.

Returning to normal seems a slow process and this includes the photography. I have not recovered the daily habit of taking photographs and deciding where to go and what to take seems more of a struggle with some of the results feeling a little forced.

That said, if there is ever a down season for landscape photography it tends to be the summer months  with all the photographic energy being saved for the autumn colour bonanza...my favourite time of the year. Of course, this assumes that the worst of the coronavirus passes and we avoid a second autumn wave of infections.

In meantime, Stallon Pond has featured regularly in my posts over the years but never by name. I have always referred to it as a ‘pond near to below Strawberry Hill Heath’ or some speculation that it is a remnant of the past mining activity in the area. But very recently, I happened to be searching the local area on Google Earth and the name appeared when I zoomed in, although it is missing on my other more often used map apps.

I always think that place names help to focus the photography providing identity to groups of images.   I can now see the potential for a collection that profiles this pond which includes some of the photographs from these two contrasting sets: the March images being more naturally monochrome and the June images reflecting the brighter seasonal colours:

June

March

On a similar theme, this set was taken on the same day in June as the Stallon Pond images. It features  another larger (but nameless) pond on land reclaimed from the old Rufford colliery. Again I was interested in the seasonal colours and reflections:

Croft Houses (Scotland 2013)

After visiting the Callanish Stones (see my previous post) the rest of the day on Lewis was spent photographing croft houses; some abandoned, others being repaired, and some locked and secured. I am not totally sure of their current or original purpose. May be some were homes, possibly peat huts or sheilings. At the time the purpose wasn’t questioned, we were more interested in the colourful nature of these buildings as the following set of photographs demonstrates: