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I’m A Creature Of The South. Born and brought up in Somerset, I lived in various places before putting down roots (for longer than I have ever stayed anywhere else in my life) in Bristol. And whenever I go outside of Bristol – for holidays, photography, birding, whatever – I almost always go south, down into Somerset, Dorset (ahhh, Dorset …), Devon or Cornwall. Why is this? Well, somehow I just don’t feel at home going northwards, its not my country, I just don’t feel that I belong there – and so to the south, towards the sun and the soft accents, perhaps.
But en route to the M4 motorway, usually on family business, I pass through the southern end of the Cotswolds, a low line of limestone hills, and there I see attractive open, rolling farmland with freestone walls. I’ve long thought about gently exploring this quiet and rural area with a camera – and thinking about it, as with many things, is as far as I’ve got.
But, last week, on 7 Dec 2016, and with 2.5 inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map firmly in hand, I at long last drove up into this countryside – and promptly found myself on a little road bordered by the counties of Wiltshire on my right and South Gloucestershire on my left. I had a good day. The place is simple and beautiful, always good attributes to my mind. Whether I will venture there or indeed anywhere else outside my usual haunts again is another matter altogether, but who knows? And so, a new Category for my blog – Outlands; new places, seeing what I can find.
And the image above? Well, I’d planned where to go. I left Bristol after the morning rush hour but still encountered appalling amounts of traffic speeding up towards the motorway. There was nothing else to do but stay amongst all these hurtling vehicles but, just before hitting the motorway itself, I saw the Tolldown Farm crossroads in the distance, felt eternally grateful for a right filter lane, turned right from that filter lane – and was instantly on a little, more or less single track road making off eastwards through open farmland.
This was the sort of quiet country road I like, with plenty of places – albeit quite muddy places – to pull the car over and get out and walk around. So, pulling on the Wellington boots that are a fixture in my car, I did just that – while trying to keep a completely open mind about what I might photograph. Winter landscapes came to mind, but how best to portray them? I had the Fujifilm X-T1 camera with me, along with my two lenses (wide angle and telephoto zooms) and a spare battery, and so many things were possible – but what to do?
I looked right, into Wiltshire, and immediately recoiled from a great line of pylons marching along beside the road, with the knee-jerk thought that these metal monstrosities must at all costs be excluded from the rural idylls(!) that I had in mind to portray – but then why exclude them, why not make them a part of things? Their skeletal forms are of course hard and stark, which fit in the winter landscape, which in a way personify Winter, so why not?
And so to the first image of the day – a bare winter landscape seen in black and white, with a faintly blue selenium tone to enhance Winter’s feel. Bare fields, bare trees, a barely seen dark wall cutting the scene just below the skyline – all as this scene might have looked a century or more ago – apart from the four, gaunt metal legs of the vast metal tower with its undeniable proclamation of intrusive and overriding – but now essential – modernity.
Technique: X-T1 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 305mm (equiv); 400 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Floral preset and adding a selenium tone.
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