Bramhall Hall – Significant Location?

The regular readers of you will know that I do like to undertake photography projects, and in fact I have 2 on the go at the present time. I’ve been somewhat hamstrung with the lockdown to do much more on the Companion Stones project, as the remaining stones require a fairly significant hike onto the moors in the Peak District. This can wait.

On my last blog post I introduced my new project which was to capture 12 “Significant Images” in a 12 month period from 12 different locations and take images in these locations in each of the 4 seasons, so effectively 48 images to pick my 12 from. Having made a start on this project the previous week, on Werneth Low, I decided again to look for another very local location. This was Bramhall Hall Park, a place I visited frequently both to view the Hall itself but also to walk around the stunning grounds.

My last visit I did spend sometime looking at the Hall itself from various positions around it, thinking it would make a great image. I had reviewed the photographs I’d taken on previous visits and had a planned location in mind. So after the calamity of the water leak in my house was resolved, a photography shoot was just the order of the day to take my mind of bathroom floors and kitchen walls, running with water.

The great thing about Bramhall Hall Park is also the reason why it can be hard to get the images you might want, and that’s because its a very popular place and lots of folk like to visit, especially in lockdown. Walking is the only outside activities that are allowed and lots of people take advantage, its churlish to moan as technically that is exactly what I was doing. This week I was armed with my full kit, Sony A7iii, with my trio of FE lenses 16 to 35 G lens, 24 to 105 g Lens and my newly purchased Tamron 70 to 180 f2.8 lens. Full choice available if I wanted them.

What follows are 3 test images that I’ve selected from the shoot, I like all 3 as they all offer something slightly different.

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I was lucky in the sense that we did have nice blue skies, with some clouds and whilst it was still 45 minutes away from sunset the sun was dropping down behind the clouds but it did cast some interesting light onto parts of the Hall, and surrounding trees etc. As you walk from the main car park here at the Hall this is the view that you are greeted with and does show off the fine elements of the outside of the building. I’m no history expert and this is not supposed to be a history blog but I think the Hall is a fine example of the period buildings. This image is taken at 24mm full frame but I have cropped the image in Lightroom to take out a sizeable portion of the lawn that you can see is infant of this side of the hall. In camera I liked the look of it but I felt a crop was required when I viewed the image in post production.

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This image was taken maybe 50 yards from the previous one and shows the same side of the Hall. You can see some of the light that was available on the roof and throws a nice shadow of the ornate chimney onto the roof. What caught my eye about this view of the hall was that I was able to get a little more foreground into the image. This is actual one of the privets that run around most of the Hall. I focused on the bench infant of the hall and that has given a softer look to the privets which I like and think works well with image of the hall. what would add to this image would be some lovely frost of snow on the ground and on the privets. The buggeration factor in this image is the tree on the right hand side, but going wider would bring more of the trees on the right into play, this is a compromise that I will look at resolving on my next visit.

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As you can probably guess this image was taken not a million miles away from the previous two, but is from lower down. The land slopes away infant of the Hall, and there is a nice lawn and eventually a small stream. I want to try to develop this view little more as it allows me to include more by way of foreground and mid ground in the image. The rocks you can see there are around most of this side of the hall and whilst being very mossy and slippy they do add something extra both in terms of colour but also texture to the image. There are also small remnants of the setting sun on the roof of the Hall, again adding a few extra touches, that lead me to believe that this should be a location that I add to my location list and come back to in each of the 4 seasons.