Photography in the fog

click photo to enlarge

When I lived in Hull and the weather was foggy I often heard the sound of the ships' foghorns as they negotiated the River Humber into the port or went out into the North Sea. Living on the Lancashire coast I heard them occasionally: there were fewer ships, fog was infrequent, and technology had advanced compared with when I lived near the east coast. Now that I'm in Lincolnshire I experience more fog than in either of the other locations but I recall hearing a ship's foghorn only once. I suppose I'm too far from the sea and ships in The Wash are relatively few, smaller, and fairly quiet.

In common with much of eastern England we've recently had a few days of mist and fog and I've made a point of going out with my camera to see what I could snap. As I've said elsewhere in this blog, fog is one of those weather conditions - like snow - that transforms a landscape and allows the photographer to make very different images in very familiar surroundings. Unfortunately inspiration seemed to have deserted me on my forays into the gloom and I came back with very little that satisfies me. The two shots I post today are the best of my meagre pickings.

Certainly, to my mind, they don't compare with some of my earlier efforts such as this jetty and yacht, this tree, this cottage or this Fenland "view". The smaller of today's offerings shows a new footbridge over a dyke on a footpath near Donington. The main image is the west end of Donington church. This marvellous piece of medieval architecture has a very interesting west doorway. It dates from the fourteenth century and, unusually for a village church, has a projecting hood with an ogee arch that protects the inner arch and door. Time and weather have eroded the sharp details of this feature, but the sculpted leaves and other mouldings can still be discerned under its current generous covering of moss.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Main Photo
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Taking the same photograph again No. 2

click photo to enlarge

If you repeatedly walk the same routes you come upon the same photographic subjects time and again. For some photographers that is a problem to be overcome by regular travel, either locally, nationally or in distant lands. Now I enjoy travel as much as the  next person, but not for its own sake, and not solely for the purposes of photography. For me travel has to offer something wider than servicing just one of my interests. And, as I've said on more than one occasion in this blog, I enjoy unearthing new photographs in familiar places and making photographs that are variations on those that I've taken before. So, a familiar walk in the area where I live is just as likely to provide me with a photographic opportunity as is a trip to the other end of the country or to an entirely different country.

The other day I had a morning walk alone, then another walk in the afternoon with my wife. On that second outing we travelled along a track that gives a fine, distant view of Donington church. Exactly one year ago yesterday I walked the same path and took a photograph with similarities to that which I post today. The earlier photograph is from a slightly different point, has a clearer sky, and was at a time when more snow covered the ground. But, the composition is essentially the same: the principal interest resides in the horizon, the trees and the bodkin-like spire of St Mary and The Holy Rood piercing the sky, with subsidiary features being the near field, the huddle of houses and the sky. What I find interesting is how different the two photographs are in feel and colour. Each has qualities that I like - the hard, cold clarity of the earlier shot and the blue/orange complementary colours of the recent one, to name but two.

I've walked the path from which the two images were taken several times during the course of the past year, and on each occasion I've looked across at this section of the horizon. But, at no time was I motivated to take another shot until the other day when the light and weather came together in a way that caused me to raise my camera to my eye.

Why the title? See this post.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 250
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Donington church

click photo to enlarge

With 22mm (35mm equivalent) I couldn't do it, but with 17mmm I can. What is it? The answer is fit this church into the frame in landscape format while showing the "semi-detached" nature of its tower.

The village of Donington - like many villages in the Lincolnshire area called Holland - has a big medieval church, a reflection of the relative prosperity of this area in the middle ages when sheep roamed the flat landscape. However, like a lot of these big churches, St Mary and the Holy Rood is fairly near to the road, has houses in close proximity, and its churchyard has a retaining wall and very tall trees. Consequently, the number of positions for a photographer who wants to capture the whole of the building, are relatively few. My recent purchase of the 17-40mm zoom, a lens that covers the range from "ultra-wide" to "normal" has solved my problem at Donington. Over the next few months I'll try it out on other local churches where this is an issue.

When I first bought an SLR in the early 1970s 35mm was considered a wide angle lens. Gradually, over the years, this came to be seen as a relatively normal focal length, and 28mm became the widest that the average amateur photographer aspired to. Today 24mm is relatively common and the enthusiast can choose from a range of wide angle lenses that go down to around 10mm, at which point the "fish-eye" lens with a 180 degree field of view enters the equation. As a result of this widening of lenses and of choice, images with distortion are much more common than formerly, and viewers are much more accepting of it. But, I'm not. Perhaps it's the legacy of my days with longer focal lengths, or perhaps it's my interest in painting and architecture. Whatever the reason, with some images I just have to straighten the verticals. Any time you point the camera up or down, and straight lines feature in the subject, you get convergence. With a wide angle, however, they occur much more frequently and noticeably. Today's image had them, and they've been corrected, as has the building's relative height. But, what can't be corrected is the proper ratios within the building. Here the chancel looks bigger than it is in real life, and the balance of tower to spire isn't quite right. One day there will doubtless be software that can deal with these anomalies. Until then, this is the best I could do as the late November sun started to disappear behind the nearby houses and trees.

For more of my images of the exterior of this church see here, here and here.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation:N/A

Commemorated in slate

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In a post a while ago I commented that anyone wanting to erect a permanent memorial to themselves could do worse than have one made in brass. However, if that memorial was to be placed outside then a better choice might be a fine slate such as that found at Swithland in Leicestershire, a material that comes in grey, bluish grey or with a greenish tinge.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular the slate from this location found its way into many churchyards in the East Midlands, Lincolnshire and even further afield. Stone masons prized it for the way very detailed patterns and letters could be cut into its smooth surface. I have a particular fondness for examples from the 1700s when florid scripts, loops, curls and swirls were used on gravestones and wall memorials made of this Swithland slate. Many churchyards in the South Holland area of Lincolnshire where I live have fine examples of this style. The memorial in today's photograph is mounted on an outside wall of the church of St Mary and the Holy Rood at Donington. It commemorates the death of a ten year old boy, Tycho Wing, who must have been a pupil at The Thomas Cowley School in Donington. The fluid script, flourishes, curving underlines, loops that emphasise, and the frame of leaf-like fronds make for a wonderfully delicate effect. Only the slightly black-letter Gothic of the word "Pickworth" departs from the overall style, and even that is brought into the design by the curls that surround it. That this piece of carved stone has been exposed to the weather for 231 years, and still carries the detail that the mason incised, is a testament to its durability and its suitability for this purpose: many of the limestone and sandstone gravestones and wall plaques of that time are now illegible.

Incidentally, the boy commemorated on this memorial must be related to the philosopher, astronomer, astrologer and instrument maker, Tycho Wing (1696-1750), who also came from Pickworth.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Celebrity pig wrangling and documentaries

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It wasn't my intention to bang on about television again - I had something much more uplifting and positive in mind - but my breakfast table reading gives me no choice. Skimming the TV listings section today I noticed a picture advertising "Jimmy's Global Harvest" on BBC2. It showed a youngish, rather unkempt looking man squatting in a field holding a piece of grass. "Who", I thought, "is Jimmy?" A short synopsis revealed all. Apparently he is Jimmy Doherty, a celebrity pig wrangler, and he's going to discover "how the world's farmers will cope with feeding a growing population." Tonight, in the first of his four programmes he looks at the transformations that have taken place in Brazilian agriculture.

It's amazing how so little writing can provoke so many questions. The first is, "What is a celebrity pig wrangler?", and the second is "Should I care?" Then there's, "Why has Jimmy, out of all the potential agricultural experts, been chosen to present these programmes?" It couldn't be because the target audience knows Jimmy and the people who conceived the series think viewers are such saps that they can't give their attention to anything that isn't fronted by a celebrity? No, that coudn't possibly be the reason. There are more questions that come to mind about the dumbing down of television documentaries, but I'll spare you them, and say that I shan't be tuning in this evening. But then you guessed that didn't you? It's not that the subject isn't sufficiently serious and important. No, I shall give it a miss because for the progamme makers world food production isn't important enough to warrant serious treatment and be introduced by someone who is an expert in the field. Or perhaps I misjudge them: maybe, having watched Jimmy wrangling his pigs in a field, they imagine him an expert in every field of agriculture.

All of which has nothing to do with today's photograph of St Mary and the Holy Rood at Donington, Lincolnshire. On a brief shopping trip I stopped and snapped this late afternoon shot as the sun descended through the churchyard trees. Donington church is one of those that is extremely difficult to photograph from nearby. It suffers - from the photographer's point of view - by having large trees nearby. It also has a tower that acts as a porch and is attached to the south aisle. This is an unusual, but attractive, arrangement that Victorian Gothic architects sometimes copied. However, it makes it quite difficult to achieve a satisfactory photographic composition given the churchyard constraints. On this image I placed the church on the right, a row of trees at the left, and moved so that part of the sun was visible at the edge of the near trunk. I wanted it to add a warm note to a cold scene, and give something of a starburst effect, which it does, more or less.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 6.3mm (30mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

St Mary & the Holy Rood, Donington

click photo to enlarge
Today's photograph shows a view across the fields near Donington, Lincolnshire, at the tail end of a late December afternoon as the sun is about to disappear below the horizon. The ground and roofs are covered with hard frozen snow, and silhouetted against the sunset glow are skeletal trees and the tower and spire of the church of St Mary and the Holy Rood.

To my knowledge this dedication is unique to Donington church. There are St Marys a-plenty, and quite a few Holyroods (notably in Edinburgh), but no other church seems to have this particular conflation of names. The word "rood" means crucifix or cross. Medieval churches frequently separated the nave (where the people congregated) from the chancel (where the clergy officiated) with a pierced wooden "rood screen", so called because it was surmounted by a representation of Christ on the cross. Many of these old screens survive today, though usually without the rood, and quite a few churches have newer, Victorian examples (complete with rood). That being the case, you might imagine that Donington church's dedication makes reference to this symbol of the Christian faith. And doubtless it does. But in what way? It could simply be an honouring of the principal icon of Christianity. Or, and I think this is more likely, the early medieval building may have held a "fragment of the True Cross" as a relic with which to attract visitors and donations of money. Many early churches displayed holy relics - fragments of saints' clothes, a lock of their hair, a bone or two, a scrap of Christ's shroud, or an old piece of wood reputed to have been brought back from the Holy Land and "definitely a piece of the cross on which our Saviour died, and yours for only a few gold sovereigns father!" Few, if any, of these can have been genuine relics, but many would have been acquired in good faith. I don't know if this is the case at Donington, but it would account for the rood getting second billing to Christ's mother in the dedication.

Donington church is a large and beautiful building that dates back to the 1100s, though much of what we see today is from the 1300s and 1400s. It was one of the sources of inspiration that Victorian Gothic architects looked to when they began to build again in this style. Like many of our old churches it needs constant attention to keep its fabric together, and it is currently undergoing some restoration. If anyone feels able to donate to this worthy cause this website tells you how to go about it.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On