The Blooming Heather
Quite a lot of you seem to have been having a lovely time recently. My Flickr feed has been filled with purple landscapes in all their finery. The heather has been blooming from one end of the land to the other. Apart from here. I’ve been waiting quietly, but all I’ve seen over the last few weeks has been a lot of brown patches. Maybe I blinked. I had a location in mind too, a little known one that Lee and I stumbled across a couple of years ago one mid September evening. All around the small patch of heathland were signs of what we’d missed. “This would look great in August,” we agreed. Last year I didn’t quite get round to making the return, all too wrapped up in the forthcoming Iceland escapade as I was, so this summer was going to be the time to visit the location once more. Except the heather doesn’t seem to have really happened - at least nowhere that I’ve been recently it hasn’t. It seems that the rest of you in other parts of the country haven’t been in a sharing mood. Well, you’ve shown me your pictures, but you haven’t sent any of the blooming heather down to Cornwall. Somebody told me it had looked pretty good down west in the middle of August, but when I went that way I saw little evidence.
This, taken at the start of June, was as good as things got for this photographer. Wheal Coates is normally a summer banker for a colourful display of purples on the clifftops around the engine houses, and Mother Nature is always on hand to add a healthy scattering of complimentary yellows in the low lying gorse. One Thursday evening after a tiring couple of days in the company of my baby grandson, and at a time when I was seriously considering a restorative gin and tonic in front of the television, I made the mistake of peering through the window. The sky was looking good on this calm and inviting evening, so despite the juniper driven lure, I sighed and dragged my weary carcass towards the car, stuffing the camera and the wide angle lens into the bag as I went. Twenty minutes later I was sitting uncomfortably on a small patch of earth, squeezed in between what blooms there were, and trying to find a suitable foreground to match the colouring sky as the sun sank towards the edge of the world across a listless pale blue ocean.
The gin might have been postponed for the moment, but I was glad to be here enjoying the peace. So often it’s a raw and brutal environment, but today there was hardly a breath on the air, and the ocean barely murmured in response to the unmistakable cries of the pair of choughs that live in the chimney of Towanroath's old engine house. Apart from the very occasional dog walker, and another lone tog who was perched further along the cliffs, there was nobody around. Well except for the man who’d pitched his tent beside the engine house - I’d have to clone him and his belongings out later. And if I could fill the foreground with purple, I might not even need to do that.
Getting the shot in focus was going to be a bit of a nuisance, with the absence of an articulating screen and a lens that refuses to focus automatically - in fact even when it does think it’s found focus by itself, it generally hasn’t. I recently enquired about getting it fixed, but it’s such an old model that the required part is no longer readily available. With the camera as low to the ground as the dinky tripod would allow, I had to lie across a particularly prickly layer of gorse to see the screen clearly enough to focus manually. And then again, and then a third time. Focus stacking is so much fun when you can’t flip out the screen and see what the camera can see from a comfortable angle - said nobody ever at all.
After half an hour of being repeatedly stabbed by stray vegetation, the light had begun to fail, and it was time to go home and open that bottle of gin. I hadn’t really got what I was looking for, but this was early June, and it was just a test run for what would come later in the season. I returned two or three times over the coming weeks, but as so often seems to happen, the first visit turned out to be the only one with passable results. At least it’s colourful. I’ll hope for a better show next year. And maybe a solution to the challenges of taking wide angle exposures at ground level too. These knees aren’t getting any younger you know.
The Blooming Heather
Quite a lot of you seem to have been having a lovely time recently. My Flickr feed has been filled with purple landscapes in all their finery. The heather has been blooming from one end of the land to the other. Apart from here. I’ve been waiting quietly, but all I’ve seen over the last few weeks has been a lot of brown patches. Maybe I blinked. I had a location in mind too, a little known one that Lee and I stumbled across a couple of years ago one mid September evening. All around the small patch of heathland were signs of what we’d missed. “This would look great in August,” we agreed. Last year I didn’t quite get round to making the return, all too wrapped up in the forthcoming Iceland escapade as I was, so this summer was going to be the time to visit the location once more. Except the heather doesn’t seem to have really happened - at least nowhere that I’ve been recently it hasn’t. It seems that the rest of you in other parts of the country haven’t been in a sharing mood. Well, you’ve shown me your pictures, but you haven’t sent any of the blooming heather down to Cornwall. Somebody told me it had looked pretty good down west in the middle of August, but when I went that way I saw little evidence.
This, taken at the start of June, was as good as things got for this photographer. Wheal Coates is normally a summer banker for a colourful display of purples on the clifftops around the engine houses, and Mother Nature is always on hand to add a healthy scattering of complimentary yellows in the low lying gorse. One Thursday evening after a tiring couple of days in the company of my baby grandson, and at a time when I was seriously considering a restorative gin and tonic in front of the television, I made the mistake of peering through the window. The sky was looking good on this calm and inviting evening, so despite the juniper driven lure, I sighed and dragged my weary carcass towards the car, stuffing the camera and the wide angle lens into the bag as I went. Twenty minutes later I was sitting uncomfortably on a small patch of earth, squeezed in between what blooms there were, and trying to find a suitable foreground to match the colouring sky as the sun sank towards the edge of the world across a listless pale blue ocean.
The gin might have been postponed for the moment, but I was glad to be here enjoying the peace. So often it’s a raw and brutal environment, but today there was hardly a breath on the air, and the ocean barely murmured in response to the unmistakable cries of the pair of choughs that live in the chimney of Towanroath's old engine house. Apart from the very occasional dog walker, and another lone tog who was perched further along the cliffs, there was nobody around. Well except for the man who’d pitched his tent beside the engine house - I’d have to clone him and his belongings out later. And if I could fill the foreground with purple, I might not even need to do that.
Getting the shot in focus was going to be a bit of a nuisance, with the absence of an articulating screen and a lens that refuses to focus automatically - in fact even when it does think it’s found focus by itself, it generally hasn’t. I recently enquired about getting it fixed, but it’s such an old model that the required part is no longer readily available. With the camera as low to the ground as the dinky tripod would allow, I had to lie across a particularly prickly layer of gorse to see the screen clearly enough to focus manually. And then again, and then a third time. Focus stacking is so much fun when you can’t flip out the screen and see what the camera can see from a comfortable angle - said nobody ever at all.
After half an hour of being repeatedly stabbed by stray vegetation, the light had begun to fail, and it was time to go home and open that bottle of gin. I hadn’t really got what I was looking for, but this was early June, and it was just a test run for what would come later in the season. I returned two or three times over the coming weeks, but as so often seems to happen, the first visit turned out to be the only one with passable results. At least it’s colourful. I’ll hope for a better show next year. And maybe a solution to the challenges of taking wide angle exposures at ground level too. These knees aren’t getting any younger you know.