West St Cemetery, Farnham

In class last month we were studying some of the history of painting that could be relevant to our photography and looking at the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I learned about the world landscape style, in which an imaginary panoramic landscape is seen from an elevated viewpoint. The horizon is high in the picture, giving the viewer a bird’s eye view of the scene. The physical canvas is large, and the characters are small. Bruegel deploys this in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, among others.  The high viewpoint and the mass of small figures show strong compositional similarities to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for example. So I started taking some pictures from a higher viewpoint, looking down at a panorama that might be a back plate for such a scene (click the images below to see them larger).

Tree and Shadow

Brightwells Yard, Farnham

A most unremarkable photo. I was struck by the tree and it’s shadow on the plain green background of the grass. I tried it in B&W but that didn’t really work for me. I tried reducing the saturation and a variety of other treatments. In the end I left it alone but changed it from Fuji’s Provia, my standard base raw interpretation to Fuji’s Classic Negative, which is somewhat less saturated. This is less bright green than I remember the original scene but more like the image I was trying to capture.

Predannack to the Lizard

Continuing on our way from Mullion we progressed from Predannack to Lizard. Here is a set of mostly unremarkable holiday snaps that hopefully conveys the beauty of the area and the riot of colours we encountered. (If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.)

Cornwall – First Day

On Monday, 22 May we did our first group walk of a bit over 8 miles, approaching Holywell Bay, then traversing The Kelsey Head, Porth Joke and West Pentire before circling back.

The approach to Holywell Bay and what we found there. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.

Train from Penrith

Thus ended our glorious sojourn in the Lake District. From Keswick we took a bus to Penrith and caught the train to London’s Waterloo station. Once again, I slowed my shutter to get some motion-blurred, pictorial images of the English countryside.

Click any image to see them each full sized (in a browser).