THE SHOOT (S)
After some last minute fettling of parts, I packed all the bits for the Rail Studio shoot up in the car ready to head out to the Dales to shoot some pictures (wanting some wide-open vistas and mountains, and limestone paving, to use as near-to-scale cliffs). Annoyingly I can think of half a dozen spots in Wales to use, but with a full calendar for the next month a trip out there before the deadline was unlikely.
It was a bit of a compromise heading out to Settle; initially I wanted somewhere a bit industrial, or at least semi-urban, as a backdrop, not unlike the original shots with the Figure, done against the motorway flyovers near Oldbury, West Midlands. However, even if I'd been free to travel down there for this shoot, the whole location is out of bounds whilst they repair the motorway. I had a bit of a scout-around Leeds, for accessible spots which could be reached near the canal...
...but quickly realised that even with an assistant, there was too much in the way of props to shift by train and walking.
Same for Skipton; the bypass provided a flyover and some canal bridges, but still too long a way from anywhere we could park.
In the end I realised that with time against me, the shoots for this project would have to be done in the countryside after all, so decided to make the most of the bleak scenery around Ingleborough. In a way this was another nod to the post-apocalyptic fiction I was drawing inspiration from, as I'd be shooting near to a lot of the settings from the novel "The Death of Grass" by John Christopher.
After a month or so of clear blue sky and hot weather, it (of course) turned grim on the days I had free to shoot. Getting up into the Dales was a nightmare of following slow-moving tanker wagons, followed by a missed turn (to be fair, my navigator was Elder Child who hadn't been with me the last time I went up for a shoot in this neck of the woods, back in the days of the Chair Project). The road we did end up on was somewhat foggy and covered in stray sheep and cows.
Turning around we managed a test set-up near Ingleborough, which would have worked out for a full shoot had the layby not become suddenly busy with inquisitive locals who wondered what we were up to.
The backup location was here at Clapham, where there was a shallow river... and typically the grass had grown noticeably since the last time I was there for a shoot, rendering it all useless. So after all that, I only managed that one shot at the layby.
The other problem was that it showed the model wasn't quite sitting level on the chassis, but it didn't show up until I looked at it on the big screen. easy enough to remedy back at home with some shims made of card or MDF.
THE RESHOOT
Well, with the model modified, and time running out, I had an evening (for a sunset shot) and a full day allocated to shoot the pics. As per expectations, the free evening was insanely cloudy and too gloomy (the nights either side of it being clear and lit until about 10.30pm of course) so that shoot was abandoned in favour of doing every pic at the weekend (nothing like have all your eggs in one basket).
So after a week of even more sunny weather, Saturday would start drizzly, turn to rain, then to thunder storms. Wizzard. Drought-stricken countries could commission me to do photoshoots for the good of their ecology's...
First stop was high in the hills above Settle; we used this spot about 4, 5 years ago for the Chair project, and I reckoned the natural Limestone Pavement would give some nice, vaguely to scale cliff faces. There were quite a few people about because there was a wedding happening on a nearby farm, as well as the more to be expected dog walkers, but we (self and Elder Child) got set up.
The weather was a bit moody, but at least we got a nice dramatic sky. A few low-angles (the one above, and the one at the top of the page, being my favourites) then it was back in the car for the next shots.
We stopped off near Helwith Bridge to look for a riverside shot (to incorporate the bridge model) but the heavens openend…
Racing ahead of the storm, we went back to the layby from the previous shoot...
...but rushing to beat the weather meant I didn't have time to set it up properly, then had to lob it all back into the car part way through to stop the rain from damaging it. It didn't look like the rain was going to stop anytime soon, so we drove on towards home.
A brief stop beside the railway line (to make the most of a communications pylon as a background item) was achieved just before the rain (which seemed to be following us) hit. It did give the idea for a possible last location, the wind turbines up above Oxenhope which I'd used for the first shoots for this the previous year.
Shooting up by the quarry provided a somewhat windswept but suitably barren location.
The station was set-up again, this time balanced properly, with the different building, and a better shot resulted. However there wasn't time to shoot more than this single set-up as the rain was closing in again, and moments after we got it all back down to the car it was coming down so heavily it was bouncing a foot off the road...
So that was that- not quite the shoot I'd hope it would be, but the best I could manage in the circumstances with the weather and time constraints. And a wide selection of images to choose from for the open calls, and with the models still to hand I'm going to try some further shoots before the summer is out...
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