Holy Island

Whilst we were in Northumberland back in August, we ticked another one off the bucket list, and visited the former priory on Holy Island.  Luckily we had a nice day for it, and whilst the museum was very interesting (especially for Amy, who'd studied this period of history), the ruins themselves were what we felt was worth seeing.

One problem reared it's head though; it was lens-flare city with the camera.  This is a side-effect of having foster children... though they swear blind they never touched the camera, after a day out the week before the lens became mysteriously smeared with a jam-like substance... which necessitated swapping the filter ring for the back-up which flared like nobodies business.  Definitely something to replace before any of the upcoming night shoots in the summer, but proof why a tenners-worth of filter ring is a wise investment on several hundreds quid worth of lens.

There's only so many ways you can photograph a set of ruins, so we took to doing some abstract shots too.

All in all, a nice place to visit, helped of course by the presence of a shop selling a great selection of locally-produced spiced mead.  Very nice.

Threlkeld

Threlkeld Quarry Museum, near Keswick, in Cumbria, has been on our list of places to visit for a while, but it's tended to be closed when we've been in the area.  Happily, it was a venue for the day visits during the Red Rose 2018 Scout Camp we were at back in the summer, so we descended en-masse with about 50 kids on a somewhat grey day.

The place was great if you're as much of a nerd for industrial archaeology as I (Ben) am, though having said that, the young people with us seemed pretty into the place, and the fact they could wander freely and explore all these old machines.

With only a phone camera to play with in between Leader duties, there wasn't much scope for photography but I managed a few shots.

Bagnall saddle tank "Sir Tom" was doing the honours on the railway line.

Not much to say; the Scouts enjoyed the place, it was an interesting visit for a couple of hours before we raced off to the next place on the itinerary, the people working there were welcoming and friendly, and we intend to re-visit by ourselves when we have a better camera and a bit more time to explore the place.

Landy

Short post this week... whilst we were camping up in Northumberland, we (Ben, and Elder Child) went green laning with Father-in-Law in his wonderful Landy.  Well, Land Rover Owner International had by coincidence published a list of green lane routes near where we were camping, so it would have been rude not to.

We were up in the hills west of Alnwick, the roads getting progressively more basic until we hit the green lane itself.

Not sure how amused Father-in-Law was with me keeping getting him to stop so I could dive out to take a pic, but I fancied getting some shots of the Landy...

Up in the bracken.  The article in the mag hadn't lied, the scenery was wonderful up here.

The sky was nice and dramatic.

Playing with a few zoom effects...

A nice evening out, and our first green lane experience.  Also fun to get some decent shots of the Landy for Father-in-Law to have too.  Might have to do some more of this, though having to jump out and drive sheep away so we could get past lost its appeal after a bit, but there might be a whole photography project (admittedly a very nerdy one) documenting the dozen different gate-locking mechanisms we encountered on a single 2-mile route.

Observe to Preserve... in Northumberland

Where "Observe to Preserve" gets even sillier...

I hadn't planned on doing any more pics for the "Observe to Preserve" project, but on a whim I packed the Figure miniature into the camera bag (as it all fits into a compact R.U box in a side pocket) when we went up camping in Northumberland during the summer.

On one of the few beach days we managed (with our usual knack for timing, we missed the heatwave by about three days), we ended up here, which struck me as being very suitable for a miniatures shoot; the natural rock formations are as close to scale cliffs as I was likely to find anywhere.

Something I've tried with the above image; digitally adding an impression of a painting onto the canvas/easel.

The golden sand gave a good impression of desert; sand and rocks are so much easier to scale with the 1/32nd miniature than natural foliage.

Not only was the sand easier to work with, with it being possible to add things like footprints in the sand, but it also gave a nice "Mad Max" post-apocalypse atmosphere to the setting.

Interestingly (if you're a geology nerd like I am) the rocks were crammed full of fossils, mainly corals and sea-plants, and they looked so suitably odd that I really wanted to find a way to incorporate them into the shoot somehow.

This sort of thing was really firing my imagination at this point; the whole concept of the project, that these artists are recording the wold after some catastrophe has occurred, fitted neatly with the imagery of these weird shapes fused into the rocks.  Mutated monsters, remains of creatures lying around?  Something to work on further anyway...

We returned to this patch of coast again later in the week, and after getting another couple of general shots, I decided to run with the 'monsters' angle inspired by the fossils.

I wanted to try and incorporate some evidence of the various sinkholes/boreholes left by burrowing razor shells and the like, but though the holes in the sand were eye catching, they didn't really stand out prominently in the shots.

The rocks covered in slightly luminous seaweed hinted at nature taking back over, in a strange way, so I took some pics nearer the sea itself.

I tried messing around with the focus, keeping the figure a little blurry in the same way that I did with one of the Tower/Studio shots on the hillside in Wales earlier in the year, and also washed out the colours a bit in post-production.

Whilst I was doing this, The Childs were fishing in the rockpools nearby, and kept finding hermit crabs... which is where the pictures really descended into silliness.

Undoubtedly my favourite early "Dr Who" story is "Genesis of the Daleks" which, amongst all the ancient, wasteland Skaro, unending war, Daleks and Davros goodness, has its moments of silliness... such as the giant mutated Clam monsters which try to eat the Doctor at one point in a cave.  I couldn't find a clamshell, but liked the idea of some giant limpet-like, mutated sea creatures existing in this world.

Equally I couldn't get the hermit crab to stay in one place long enough to photograph, but then spotted this very dead crab left behind by something bigger...

...real silliness resulted, I loved the implication that the artist had casually killed off some horrendous, radiation-mutated monstrous sea creature then casually gone about his painting.

Just as the project was getting stale, I think I may have opened up some more avenues to explore with this, shedding a bit more light on the mad world which the "Observe to Preserve" organisation are trying to record.  When I did the "Britannia Model Village" project I tried to let the story of the world be told by the background items and imagery, so now I'm wondering if I can expand a bit with this theme in a similar way.

The Early Bird...

The Early Bird Catches the Worm... and the Insomniac Railway Enthusiast Photographs The Ridiculously Early-Running Loco Movement.  One of the lesser-known advantages to only getting about 4 hours a night's kip is being able to nip out in the very early hours of the morning to see and record unusual movements on the railway.

The summer heatwave meant that "Royal Scot" got stuck on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, and after some weeks, the owner sent one of his Class 47 diesel locomotives to pick it up.  And yes, jealousy being what it is, I would love to have the sort of money where I had a fleet of steam and diesel locomotives to play with...

Anyway, the Elder Childs were both on an inset day, and the 47 passed us whilst we were on the way to Skipton.  When we got back to Keighley, it was parked up at the steam railway, so we went to get some snaps from the public footpath, along with at least a dozen other railway photographers, but the white sky didn't exactly help getting the shots.  I did manage a couple by leaning out of the window whilst on the next leg of our day trip.

The sky was looking a little better come the evening, so I nipped back out with the camera.

Having checked the online timetable, I knew the train would be leaving the KWVR just after 5am, so headed on to Keighley where to my surprise there were other insomniac photographers knocking around...

The consist leaving the KWVR, and out onto the mainline...

I thought I'd head down to Bingley Station where I could at least get up close to the train in nice surroundings.  Being so early in the morning, the camera was struggling a bit with the moving target; despite several trains being listed as running beforehand, the collapse of the NR timetable meant actually nothing came trundling through to practise on...

Happily, the whole ensemble was reversing at Shipley on the triangle of lines there, for the run to Crewe, so after about half an hour I was able to photograph it running back through again, when it was slightly lighter.  It was a novel experience to have something other than reading or housework to do when I couldn't sleep, and I had the car home in time for Amy to be getting up at 6 to go to work.  I was slightly surprised how many other photographers were up and about though... maybe we could start a support group.