Onegav

To just come straight out with it, today was a bit of therapy for me, really, more than a photographic exersise. I was feeling pretty grim driving home from work, so I took myself off down some unknown lanes to have a few minutes to clear my mind.

Being among the trees, and the rolling countryside you see, is very refreshing, its one of the best places I find to gather your thoughts.

So I combined some chill out with a bit of landscape photography for my 365 challenge today.

I drove around for about 20minutes, slowly chugging down the country lanes peering through every gate and every gap in the fence, to see what I could see.

I was basically driving up between Helsby Hill and Frodsham Hill, along a lane called “Ridge Way”, and with a name like that it had to lead to somewhere cool didn’t it!

I kept going as the lane was going up hill, and its always good to get a bit of elevation, to hopefully get a good view, of something.

Eventually, I came to a spot that looked like the type of thing I was looking for. I found the next available turning point and doubled back, and parked in the mouth of a gate leading into a field that rolled away into the distance.

The light was rubbish again, but the rolling hills looked really nice, and with a nice row of trees, a couple of individual trees and a tree stump, there was a good bit of interest in the scene too, so I decided to take some photographs.

With the light being poor, I used esposure bracketing to pull some detail into the sky. It worked pretty well I think, though there still wasnt much going on in the clouds.

Learnings – I had a good clear out of my head tonight, spending half an hour in the countryside, which was really beneficial to me. It was kind of nice to just take a photograph of something fairly unassuming, just some rolling fields, stretching off into the distance. I guess I learnt some more about lighting, and that it really cant be forced. If the lights not there, its just not there, but its still nice to go out looking for it, because who knows what else you might find!

Its not obvious in these photographs, but in the distance is a really bright light, a single light all on its own. I think I’ll visit this spot again in the near future, once night has fallen and when the sky is clear, because I think that solitary light might just make this scene something really special!