On the Bandwagon
I blame people like us. We take pictures of pretty things in pretty places and share them with the world after all, so what do we expect? Post them here on the pages of Flickr and the chances are that only photographers will see them. But then again so many of us also post our photos on sites where a lot more people see them - pretty people who grin into their phones and post the images to far more followers than many of us are ever likely to have. Guilty Milord.
Well that's what I was thinking to myself yesterday as I searched for the quieter spaces amongst the hordes. It was a bit of a surprise to find so many people here on a Monday, but what we hadn't bargained for was the fact that it was a Baker Day, an occasional school closure day devised by an Education Secretary of yesteryear who wanted to invent something to endorse his passage into the House of Lords with a knighthood before leaving office. They all like to do things like that don't they? Suffice to say, there were far more people wandering around the handful of increasingly famous poppy fields than expected, most of them respectful, but with a noticeable minority strolling in among the flowers as if they somehow thought their footsteps wouldn't cause any damage to this fragile beauty spot. In fact one of you had recently asked me whether it was worth visiting the poppies this year, and a few messages were exchanged on the subject as I held my head in my hands at the sight of the family who took turns to lie down in an already flattened bed just a handful of yards in front of the composition I was busily lining up. And I'll bet their Instagram post gets a load more likes than mine does too. If I were half a head taller and rather more menacing in nature I might have had words, but of course I'm British and I don't like to make a scene. How often I've watched Arnold or Clint in a movie just looking at the bad guys in a certain way, artfully persuading them to move on with nothing more than the raising of a single eyebrow unless they wanted to be turned into toast. "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." I wish I could do that sometimes. Most of the time in fact.
Relieved that the world had finally gone back to work, we'd arrived here in the van for the day after a fun packed "platty joobs" (I think I've spelt that correctly) weekend, at times checking in to see how Her Majesty was holding up amid all the excitement. At other moments over the long weekend we wandered across the road, making use of our locals' free entry wristbands to the ever growing music festival that drowns all other sounds from the air around here for three days at this time each year. Of course neither Ali nor I are keen on crowds, but it didn't stop us from making our way to the front row to see what a sixty year old pop star with a penchant for profanities who's spent much of his life shovelling illegal substances into his bloodstream looks like. A fun gig, but although she may be ninety-six, the Queen looks a lot better than Shaun Ryder, bless him. No wonder Black Grape have only made three albums in twenty-nine years.
This year's poppy show also seemed to have expanded, with more fields than ever seemingly painted red, planted by the National Trust who own this patch of land. Maybe it needed to be so in order to accommodate the number of people who seemed intent on visiting. Maybe I'm just used to arriving later in the day when most of them have headed to the Bowgie for their supper. But I'd decided I was going to go low to the ground and concentrate on greens, yellows and of course reds, rather than blues, making the sky all but an irrelevance. I've shot that classic view more than once before, and so have many others, so this time I preferred to concentrate on the small details right in front of me. Not for the first time I used the long lens that seems to work so well here, and I'm still wondering whether the 100-400 might have been an even better option. I had the crop camera with the art lens in the bag too, but that's where it stayed.
What did surprise me when I saved my raw files into my online drive was the fact that it was my first visit here since 2018. And there was I thinking I came here every year. So it seems that I may not be responsible for the arrival of the masses after all. It must be you then. Although I've just done it myself again haven't I?
On the Bandwagon
I blame people like us. We take pictures of pretty things in pretty places and share them with the world after all, so what do we expect? Post them here on the pages of Flickr and the chances are that only photographers will see them. But then again so many of us also post our photos on sites where a lot more people see them - pretty people who grin into their phones and post the images to far more followers than many of us are ever likely to have. Guilty Milord.
Well that's what I was thinking to myself yesterday as I searched for the quieter spaces amongst the hordes. It was a bit of a surprise to find so many people here on a Monday, but what we hadn't bargained for was the fact that it was a Baker Day, an occasional school closure day devised by an Education Secretary of yesteryear who wanted to invent something to endorse his passage into the House of Lords with a knighthood before leaving office. They all like to do things like that don't they? Suffice to say, there were far more people wandering around the handful of increasingly famous poppy fields than expected, most of them respectful, but with a noticeable minority strolling in among the flowers as if they somehow thought their footsteps wouldn't cause any damage to this fragile beauty spot. In fact one of you had recently asked me whether it was worth visiting the poppies this year, and a few messages were exchanged on the subject as I held my head in my hands at the sight of the family who took turns to lie down in an already flattened bed just a handful of yards in front of the composition I was busily lining up. And I'll bet their Instagram post gets a load more likes than mine does too. If I were half a head taller and rather more menacing in nature I might have had words, but of course I'm British and I don't like to make a scene. How often I've watched Arnold or Clint in a movie just looking at the bad guys in a certain way, artfully persuading them to move on with nothing more than the raising of a single eyebrow unless they wanted to be turned into toast. "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." I wish I could do that sometimes. Most of the time in fact.
Relieved that the world had finally gone back to work, we'd arrived here in the van for the day after a fun packed "platty joobs" (I think I've spelt that correctly) weekend, at times checking in to see how Her Majesty was holding up amid all the excitement. At other moments over the long weekend we wandered across the road, making use of our locals' free entry wristbands to the ever growing music festival that drowns all other sounds from the air around here for three days at this time each year. Of course neither Ali nor I are keen on crowds, but it didn't stop us from making our way to the front row to see what a sixty year old pop star with a penchant for profanities who's spent much of his life shovelling illegal substances into his bloodstream looks like. A fun gig, but although she may be ninety-six, the Queen looks a lot better than Shaun Ryder, bless him. No wonder Black Grape have only made three albums in twenty-nine years.
This year's poppy show also seemed to have expanded, with more fields than ever seemingly painted red, planted by the National Trust who own this patch of land. Maybe it needed to be so in order to accommodate the number of people who seemed intent on visiting. Maybe I'm just used to arriving later in the day when most of them have headed to the Bowgie for their supper. But I'd decided I was going to go low to the ground and concentrate on greens, yellows and of course reds, rather than blues, making the sky all but an irrelevance. I've shot that classic view more than once before, and so have many others, so this time I preferred to concentrate on the small details right in front of me. Not for the first time I used the long lens that seems to work so well here, and I'm still wondering whether the 100-400 might have been an even better option. I had the crop camera with the art lens in the bag too, but that's where it stayed.
What did surprise me when I saved my raw files into my online drive was the fact that it was my first visit here since 2018. And there was I thinking I came here every year. So it seems that I may not be responsible for the arrival of the masses after all. It must be you then. Although I've just done it myself again haven't I?