River Avon and Abbey Mill, Tewkesbury

click photo to enlarge

One of the pleasures of photography is photographing the same subject in different ways. This requires a little imagination combined with the manipulation of the many variables available to the photographer. The camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, time of day, season, weather and viewpoint are just a few of the things that can be changed to secure a contrasting photograph of a subject taken on a previous occasion.

Today's photograph of Abbey Mill in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, is quite different from my previous shots (in fact my first) of the subject taken in October of last year. On that occasion I managed to get photographs under a threatening sky, and again when the weather appeared much calmer. My recent shots, of which this is the best, were taken on a pleasantly warm, bright afternoon in May. There was an absence of drama in the sky so I gained a little by positioning myself downstream of the weir and used the froth-filled water of the River Avon (known here, for obvious reasons, as the Mill Avon) as the foreground against which I positioned the mill and the distant crossing tower of Tewkesbury Abbey. One of the purposes of photography is to describe a scene; to tell the viewer about the subject. When I took my earlier shots I was aware that I hadn't shown the mill's position by a weir - in that photograph it couldn't be discerned below the footbridge. So, my aim in this shot was to complement the previous images and give the viewer a fuller picture of this fascinating old building and its context.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Water birds, weirs and what ifs

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Freshwater birds, by and large, prefer calm water. Most ducks, waders, herons and smaller species find their food, raise their young and spend their days around slow moving rivers or open expanses of water. There are exceptions of course. Dippers only frequent quickly running rivers and streams, and grey wagtails, though they are found in a range of waterside locations, prefer the quicker stretches of a river. Common sandpipers aren't averse to such locations either. I've seen adult red breasted mergansers with a brood of fluffy chicks bouncing down a steep and stony Lakeland beck, but for most of the year these birds too will choose the calmer reaches of rivers, lakes and even the sea. Certainly common ducks such as the mallard generally favour ponds, meres, lakes and sluggish rivers.

Where a river has a weir the water above the drop is often flat and calm. I've watched mallard and tufted duck as well as coot and moorhen feeding in such places, dabbling or diving as the pull of the water slowly draws them to the tipping point, then paddling away from the edge as they get too close. I've often wondered if at such times, a bird that is distracted by the prospect of a tasty morsel, ever loses its sense of where it is relative to the weir and is drawn over the edge. It's not something I've ever seen happen. Until the other day when we were at Cogglesford Mill in Sleaford.

I took a photograph at this location a few weeks ago, and as I stood at the same spot again I saw a pair of mallard being pulled towards the falling water. The male kept out of harms way, but the female drifted over the edge. However, rather than dropping into the foaming water below, she extended her wings, flapped them very purposefully and in combination with walking on the water, got herself back to swimming again. Unfortunately, by the time I raised my camera to my eye this scene was played out. But I did get this shot with the still disturbed water going over the weir's edge and the female heading for a safer spot.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm
F No: 7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -1.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On 

The fascination of weirs

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Over the years I must have spent many happy hours staring at river water as it pours over a weir. Being raised in the the Yorkshire Dales near the fast-flowing River Ribble exposed me to a number, and I remember, as a child, being fascinated by the way water passed over them, changing from a slowly moving, smooth sheen to an organised, falling turbulence which finally became a turmoil of frothing foam. Like most people, when I see one today, I still stop and look at it.

The weir in today's photograph is small compared with those at, say, Settle or Langcliffe on the upper Ribble. However, size isn't a crucial factor in enjoying a weir, and a diminutive example has the advantage of concentrating your attention on a smaller, ever-changing area. This one is on the River Slea in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, near Cogglesford Mill. The old water-mill is at a point where a navigable part of the river falls into the natural, meandering water-course, and has structures around it - walls, bars, grilles etc - that are no longer used. What caught my eye here was the complementary contrast of the reflected yellow leaves of the overhanging tree with the blue of the sky. I consciously composed the shot with three distinct horizontal bands. However, it wasn't until I got home and had the image in front of me on the computer that I saw the solid, dark lines - one large, and the other smaller - across the bottom of the top of the three sections. What caused them? Then I remebered that there was a bar, wooden I think, fixed across the watercourse a foot or two above the lip of the weir, and the lines are its reflections.

Incidentally, the water above the weir was smooth and quite reflective, but the passage of a few ducks had caused the turbulence that broke up the tree's reflection a few seconds before I took the photograph. For another of my weir images see here.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 154mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 1250
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Reflecting on the River Welland

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You're walking through the countryside and your path leads to a bridge over a river or a stream. You walk forward onto the bridge, and then what? Well, if you're like me, and just about everyone I've ever observed doing this, you stop in the middle and turn to look either upstream or downstream. It feels like the natural thing to do. We don't seem to be able to help ourselves. So what is it about bridges over water that make us stop and look, when discretion might be urging us to keep going until we're back with our feet fixed firmly on terra firma?

I suppose it's the pleasure that comes from surveying a stretch of moving water, no matter how small. And the curiosity about what it might contain - the fish, frogs, rocks, weed and the other things that we can see: and the lurking things we can't see, but wonder about, in the dark, still pools. Could it be a relic of our primitive past when a stretch of water offered the chance of fresh food? Or maybe it's an aesthetic urge to trace a river's course with our eye, following the banks, the depths and shallows, the brooding shadows and dancing highlights, the never still ripples and eddies, as they move towards us, under our feet, and away. Then there's the smell of the air above water, fresh clean and sharp from streams that flow quickly over rocky beds, slightly musty and dank from slow flowing waterways as they meander through the lowlands. And finally, there's the sound that varies from the crashing roar of a rocky river in spate, to the gentle swish and occasional plop of a slow moving stream.

The other day I stood on a small footbridge that spans part of the River Welland at Deeping St James. This is a fairly slow moving, quiet river, but at this particular point it was noisy because there was a man-made weir below me. I'd heard it from a distance as I approached the river, and found it, fast-moving, with spray, swirling ripples, and shooting water. I stopped half way across to take a few photographs, closing down the aperture to f22 to slow the shutter speed and blur the moving water. I've taken shots of this kind before, but here I concentrated on where the water tipped over the edge of the small weir and slid down an incline before hitting the pool below. The differing speeds of the water in each part of its journey gave differing effects, and I reflected that making images like this is yet another reason for pausing when your path leads across a bridge over water.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 106mm (212mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f22
Shutter Speed: 1/13 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -2.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On