That same afternoon (16 May) we had a tour of the Thomas Hardy cottage. It’s been decades since I read Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and I scarcely remember them. The guide told us a lot about Hardy’s life and his family’s history in the area. I took a few pictures – click any of them to see them enlarged to full size.
Note the extremely clear Mediterranean or Caribbean waters. The kayaker in Stair Hole climbed up and hung from the top of the hole, then we progressed onward to Lulworth Cove (last 2 pictures – click any of them to see them all enlarged with captions). And see the panorama below…
I created the panorama below by stitching together 14 individual handheld shots, sweeping across the horizon. For those interested in technical details, Photoshop stitched them together, evening out changes in sky tone and filling in gaps at top and bottom like a Mercator map projection. The file is 11.5 feet wide and 17″ tall at 300 dpi! Photoshop saved it as a psb file as it wouldn’t fit in the standard .psd format and it was over 4GB. To save space I flattened the image and saved it as a TIFF but it’s still about 1.4GB. You can’t see it here, but opening it up in Photoshop you can zoom in and traverse it like an interactive gaming space. I shot several series like this over the course of the 2 week trip but the files are frankly too large to do this for every set so I’m not sure I’ll bother just for a pretty landscape.
The next day, we only walked about 3 miles in a circuit starting from Lulworth and ending at Lulworth Cove .
If you succumb to any of these hazards, you may find yourself with a Scratchy Bottom:
Click any image below to see them all full-sized, with captions.
This was a carefully composed shot and it looks it. I then waited for the bird to take off and while the composition is a tad less balanced, I think it may still be more interesting:
Lyme Regis is also the setting for John Fowles’ great novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Meryl Streep was in the movie, also quite good) and this dusky, silhouetted self portrait in a beachfront shop window reminded me of it. I’ve now posted 6 times over 2 days just to cover a single day of our excursion. It may be a long month.
Lyme Regis is on the Jurassic Coast, according to Wikipedia, “a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about 96 miles (154Â km), and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in mid-December 2001.”
After dinner we walked along the beach and saw interesting stones, possible fossils and seaweeds. Click any image to enlarge them all and see the captions.
That same evening (as the last 3 posts, May 15th) we walked down a steep hill from our AirBnB into the town for dinner and I snapped a few shots of buildings where the contrasty lines and shapes struck me. Click any image to see them all enlarged to full size.
This past semester my photographic practice has been exploring the subject of inequality: wealth and income inequality as well as gender and ethnic disparities. I have been incorporating text from signs into scenes using Photoshop. For the summer, my tutor suggested placing text-based images I create into the landscape and rephotographing them. So before departing on this trip I prepared 3 images. One simply says “Broken Promises,” a famous graffito from the Bronx, another shows mathematical symbols for inequality, “<>” and “≠,” and I also abstracted a sign I saw in the car park of the Palm Springs Art Museum on a trip several years ago that simply says, “Imagine Art Here.” Then I asked Margaret to hold them for me while we were near Golden Cap. I also found places along our walks to place them in the scene. I’m not sure they’re really doing that much for me. Click any image to see them enlarged.
As a lifetime urbanite, the idea that one can simply take a walk in the country and encounter sheep and cows up close and personal is a bit thrilling. We walked among the cows, being careful not to startle them. See last post for more details of this walk – click any image to see them all enlarged.
We took our first short (4.3 mile) hike in the Lyme Regis area to Golden Cap, “arguably the highest point on the south coast of Great Britain.” The views were breathtaking and I’m not sure these pictures really capture the feeling of being there. Click any image to see them all at full size.
After dinner we explored the beach and seashore. Click any image to see them all enlarged to full size.
Some initial impressions of Lyme Regis. Click any image to see them all enlarged to full size.
Next we took a combination of A3x roads towards our destination of Lyme Regis and I managed a few snaps out the window as we went (I wasn’t the one driving). As we grew closer to Lyme Regis we passed through thick fog, or maybe a cloud.
