I really wasn’t expecting to be able to get out last weekend, or even my non working day. However, the gods of work and car body repairs all conspired in my favour and I was able to get out for a couple of hours on Friday afternoon. Bramhall Hall is a local landmark that I’ve visited regularly over the years and I even pushed my son around the park in his pram many years ago. This was maybe my forth visit to capture images for my 12 Significant Photos project to this location. I haven’t been overly happy with the images I’d taken thus far but was hopeful of at least capturing an image with some nice light along with the fabulous hall itself.
One of the perils of shooting locations that are in public places, is that the public have a habit of being there! How very dare they!This particular Friday afternoon there were folk around but mercifully there weren’t too many to be a major annoyance. I decided I would try to get an image from a different perspective this time and deliberately walked to the front of the Hall, a place I’d not tried before, mainly because of people always being there.
I wanted to add something to the image of the Hall rather than just be the camera capturing the wide expanses of the building. In all honesty the location of the image above was a bit of a fluke, in the sense that I put down my big bag on a bench so I could answer my phone. As I sat chatting on the phone its struck me that the path through the gardens was a great line that leads into the entrance of the Hall.
The weather forecast was for some broken cloud, and I was hoping that the sun, as it set, might give me some nice light onto the front of the entrance to the Hall. As you can see from the image I did indeed get some nice light. The beauty of broken clouds is that they tend to move across the sky, as the wind is what has broken them up in the first place.
With that in mind I decided I would try to capture an image that made more of the clouds in the sky, and this needed one of my ND filters, in this case the Lee Big Stopper. I did experiment with various shutter speeds and the image below has a shutters speed of 49 seconds with aperture at f11 and iso 100. I like the effect of the clouds, but there isn’t much light.
One of the things I do like about taking images in public places is that folk come to talk to me. You that know me will know I do like a good chat and I was joined by a lovely gentleman who told me he was a member of the Friends of The Hall and he wondered what I was doing. e said that I looked ,like a professional photographer and wondered if I was taking images for a magazine! For one moment I was tempted but I told him I was just an enthusiast, who was taking images forma project I was working on. What a nice bloke he was.
The other good thing about this sort of location is that they always have a lovely coffee shop, and Bramhall Hall is no different. A nice hot cup of coffee and a piece off ginger cake later, I started to search for more alternative images of the Hall but trying to use the conditions of the afternoon as part of the image.
I’ve literally stood at every vantage point infant of the hall and taken images, and haven’t really been happy with any of them. Whilst this is a straight up shot of the hall, what adds that little bit extra to the image is the broken clouds and the sky peeping through those gaps. I have a few versions of this a different focal lengths and orietations, but I think this is the best of the lot. This is shot at 34mm, with aperture f7.1, iso 100 and 8 second shutter speed. Thats just long enough to capture the motion in the sky without reducing it to a blanket coverage of cloud. I like this image.
I only have 4 weeks left until my 12 months are over and I will have to select the 12 images that I intend to present as my finished project. That will be tough, but I will do it and that will be all part of the learning experience that this project has been for me.