It's March already - Visible Landscape

Doesn’t time fly, over 2 months have passed since my last post. It’s been a funny start to the year. A mixed bag of weather, but with an abundance of grey skies. I made an early visit to Hayling Island, really just to get out and about and took this 30s exposure.

The snow was all too brief, I had wanted to get out and about more, shooting various locations but sadly it was not to be. The image below is of St Wilfreds Church in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Although it’s a modern church with the foundation stone being laid in 1908, it does look somewhat odd due to the fact it was never completed as per original design.

The chancel, transepts and three bays of the nave were ready by 1910, with the intention of adding in due course the remaining three bays and tower, which was to have a copper spire . Nothing more was done and only a stump to the north shows the intended position of the tower. I guess a lack of funds and falling congregation attendances was why it was never built.

Continuing with the b&w theme is a couple of beach images – the first of which is one I took after forcing myself out with the camera after a couple of barren weeks, the subject matter is a surface water outfall pipe taken with a medium exposure setting resulting in the backwash streaks.

I find it amusing that the streaks of the backwash that I tried to get in the above image came about almost by accident in this next image. The distant cloud low on the horizon had caught my eye and I was looking for a place to pull over and park, by the time I had parked up and got down to the beach and had the camera set up the light on the clouds had started to fade. The resulting colour image was a poor representation of what I had previously witnessed so I decided to process it as a b&w which gives a stronger depiction of the clouds and makes for quite a powerful image in my view.(below)

Towards the end of February I decided to have a go at shooting star strails and chose the “Church on the Hill” at Idsworth as a location for my second attempt at it. I was quite pleased with the resulting images from that night – I just need to work on my skills of blending layers when working on composites.

Idsworth Church

Out of nowhere we had a wonderful warm sunny day, so late afternoon I ventured down to Bosham Harbour with the view of staying for the sunset and then after an hour or so start shooting some startrails. The first part of the plan worked, however the startrail part failed to deliver the results I wanted. I’ve included the resultant image below. Far to much light pollution reflecting on the thin clouds.
I tried many ways of removing the “pollution” from desaturating the colours to digital gnd filters, none worked satisfactually, so it was a case of having to make another but much later attempt. One of the annoying things about shooting trails over Bosham is the bright lights of the harbour and the constantly moving boats and tides. Another setback I kept having was the lens misting up with the dew that was appearing with a worrying regularity. In the meantime I shifted my focus from the harbour to the plethora of churches in the local area mainy of which are Norman in construction. The one pictured here on the right is of St. Andrews church at Tangmere in West Sussex . This image was taken from a stack of images I had taken to create a startrail. The gravestones in this image are from the area of the churchyard containing the bodies of service personnel killed in WWII. Its close proximity to the RAF base meant that service personnel killed on or near the base were regularly buried within the church’s cemetery. There are thirty nine Commonwealth burials of the 1939-1945 War, all airmen, one of whom is unidentified. There are thirteen Luftwaffe burials here, one of whom is unidentified. The majority of these airmen were killed during the Battle of Britain. Today, all of these graves are tended to by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with the Commonwealth war graves grouped in three rows on the western side of the church, and beside them the German graves.

This last image of Priory Church of St Mary & St Blaise, Boxgrove, has an exposure time of about 4-5 minutes which is long enough to give a good indication of as to where the polestar is due to the stars appearing to be rotated around it. If I recall correctly there was about a half moon at the time which is good for lighting the scene but not so good for photographing lots of stars.