Photo Challenge

Shadowed At Wenlock Priory

In its time, the Cluniac Priory at Much Wenlock, Shropshire, did much overshadowing. For one thing it was physically one of the largest ecclesiastical houses in medieval Europe. For another, its Prior ruled over both its resident French monks and the lay populace of peasant farmers and artisans who lived and worked beyond its walls. Then in 1540 came the Dissolution of the monasteries. By order of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer, roofs were stripped of their protecting (highly valuable) lead, and the place, no longer watertight, literally, if slowly, began to dissolve.

Before the end though, the Priory was often a spot for some very shady dealings, forging currency not the least of them.

There’s more about the history in earlier posts Centred at Wenlock Priory and 5 Stories 5 Photos: Hidden Wenlock #2 All of which had me thinking about shadows and recalling the early autumn afternoon when I went to the Priory specifically to capture the ruins in some high-contrast light conditions. I’d taken many photos there in the past, but in the middle of the day. The end products were, without exception, pretty underwhelming.

And so for John’s Lens-Artists’ challenge I thought I’d show a series of different shadowed shots from that late-day autumn visit. I was using a point and shoot Panasonic Lumix including the dynamic monochrome setting for the sepia and black and white shots.

Lens-Artists: Shadowed This week John sets the theme and explores different approaches in his post.

The Power Of Juxtaposition

Grasses, sky and clouds on Wenlock Edge

Sometimes you need to lie down to take a photo; taking this header shot was one of those moments. I wondered how the thin stems of meadow grasses would look against the fiery sky. They had much to compete with. Some more distant treetops got a look in too. Earth to sky: we’re holding our own despite the light show.

And a different take on earthly-aerial juxtapositions; this time a barley field, sun reflecting off the tufty awns that surround the grain. I liked the contrasting textures of spiky crop and meringue-soft cloud; the green against the blue, white-grey contrast:

The colour red always makes its presence felt. Here a single red bird cherry leaf:

The showy crab apples somehow make a lowly snail all the more remarkable.

I do take an awful lot of landscape photos, but perhaps you can have too many ‘good views’. The presence of some living/moving element generally makes for a more engaging shot:

This rather strange view of a Stiperstones tor was shot in monochrome in gloomy midday light. Odd things seem to happen in this mysterious Shropshire upland: so who knows where the sky went. But then I liked the happenstance appearance of the tight-knit group of hikers. They walked into the shot, their group posture conveying group purpose: they will reach the top.

And you want to follow them.

This is another chance Stiperstones photo, taken on the same day. Despite the poor light the tor does seem to radiate something. That’s my other half on the skyline. As ever he has stopped to see what had become of me, dawdling somewhere behind. I was so pleased when he stood still. There he is – a tiny human beside a momentous stack of geology, remnant of the ancient days when this quartzite ridge was crushed and fractured during the last Ice Age.

Back then, two great glaciers (one from Ireland, the other from the heights of Plynlimon in mid-Wales) convened in the Shropshire hills. They kept the ridge company, not covering it, but nudging the tops through alternating periods of freeze and thaw. Needless to say, this would not have been a human-friendly landscape. Even now, in bad weather, it is a brutally exposed spot.

And closer to home, the not quite live elephant on Wintles Hill adds a certain something (if only viewer puzzlement) to this Shropshire autumn landscape. The different layers of sunlight and shadow also caught my eye:

#IAmNotACrop

Lens-Artists: the power of juxtaposition This week Patti at Lens-Artists asks us to consider the power of juxtaposition in our compositions. Please see her super post for guidance and inspiration.

The Space Between: Monochrome Madness

Between trees and path and sky on Wenlock Edge

Dandelion clocks in outer space

The wood between the trees

Wired

This week at Monochrome Madness, Stupidity Hole sets a thought-provoking theme: The Space Between

Caught In Time…

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

This tiny British butterfly is a male Common Blue. It’s about an inch across. And while it might be among our most common UK butterflies, having one pose like this is a rare occurrence. They’re usually pretty skittish, so you only catch a glint, a flitting chink of summer sky, and then they’re gone. This was a chance encounter on a summer’s evening.

Expectations are like clouds – beautiful from afar, yet vanishing when you reach for them Monika Ajay Kaul

The light does not stay… Tennessee Williams

There’s that moment as the sun disappears when there’s just enough light to take a photo.

So passeth, in the passing of the day, of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre

Edmund Spencer

The glory of a Morning Glory is so brief, half a day at most. And you need to be up early to catch the best of it. I’m not sure how long the runner bean flowers last, perhaps a couple of days before they’re fertilised and begin to transform into beans. I must pay more attention next summer.

mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into

Seamus Heaney North

The wind shall blow them none knows whither

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Foolhardy or deeply ironic: a dandelion clock for a timepiece? But then it always was such fun, huffing and puffing, seeing how far those little parachutes would fly. A sure way to annoy a gardener.

Leaves are the verbs that conjugate the seasons

Gretel Ehrlich The Solace of Open Spaces

Two seasons on Much Wenlock’s Linden Walk. Watching the leaves come and go through the year is another kind of time-keeping. The quiet sort.

Lens-Artists: Ephemeral This week Tina sets the theme. Call in to see her thoughtful and inspiring post.

Scavenging The Old Africa Album

This week at Lens-Artists, Anne from Slow Shutter Speed sends us on a virtual scavenger hunt. I haven’t been in the old Africa album for a while, so I thought I’d have a rumage there. A virtual mini safari as well then.

‘Wavy lines’ tops the list. The header thus features a wavy profile of hippo ears, eyes and noses in a wavy Lake Naivasha in the Kenya Rift Valley.

This herd of Maasai Mara elephants was in a very peaceable mood. They walked around us as we were parked up eating a picnic breakfast. I’m thinking elephant hide would feel pretty ‘bumpy’ should one ever dare to try it, especially the trunks.

Whereas cheetahs must be wonderfully ‘soft’. They also wear nice ‘circular’ spots. This female was having an afternoon siesta when we pulled up beside her in a safari truck. She didn’t look at us, but simply posed like a professional, well used to having her photo taken.

And more ‘patterns’. This time stripes. Zebras come with wavy ones:

And then there’s another Kenyan speciality, patterns-wise:

Cotton kanga wraps come in pairs with vivid designs and snappy Swahili slogans on the hems, here worn by Digo girls on Mombasa Beach.

Now for ‘smooth’ water and a smooth dug-out canoe on Tiwi lagoon. A Digo fisherman under the midday sun. I’m guessing he’s looking for reef lobster.

And as for ‘cool shadows’, here’s me escaping to some at a Tiwi beach bar. Not so much too hot, as too bright to see out on the white coral sand. Aaah! Those were the days.

Lens-Artists: Virtual Scavenger Hunt This week Anne at Slow Shutter Speed sends us on a photo quest, five to ten of the following: wavy lines, bumpy or soft texture, patterns, things circular, rectangular, smooth, made of glass, something with water in it, with green eyes, a wheel, a camera, cool shadows or jewellery…

Macro Monday: Spotted This Morning

Seven-spot Ladybird on Rudbeckia

In A Certain Light

I was walking in the deep shadows of Much Wenlock’s old railway line when a break in the tree cover provided this moment for a backlit photo: the spread ‘palms’ of Horse Chestnut leaves holding up the sun.

This section of clear-felled woodland viewed through a row of standing conifers caught my eye on a walk up to Iron Age hillfort, Croft Ambrey, just over the Shropshire border in Herefordshire. It was a bright autumn day, the last day of October in fact.

Here’s the non-sepia version:

I’m often inclined to take photos in very unpromising light conditions. This next shot, edited in sepia tones, is of the ruined nave of Much Wenlock Priory taken after the sun has just set. I like the slices of remnant light inside the windows and on the corner stonework.

No people in glasshouses in the next shot, only weeds and general abandonment. It was a chance shot one winter’s afternoon as I was leaving my allotment plot. The glow inside the old greenhouses struck me as unearthly, a bit E.T.-ish. What alien life forms might be sprouting in there as the sunlight strikes them?

This next structure was caught in full-on spring sunshine.

Whereas these Pembrokeshire rooks, were snapped as they came home to roost in winter twilight:

Finally, a sunsetting shot, taken looking out on the Mawddach Estuary. It’s a favourite Farrell spot in the garden of Borthwnog Hall, near Dolgellau, mid Wales

Monochrome Madness: Backlighting This week at Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, Brian aka Bushboy sets the theme. He wants to see our backlit photos, but for more inspiration, please take a look at his post.

After The Harvest: Of Stubble And Straw

Come August and this year’s harvest has already been and gone. A good month earlier than usual. And somehow we missed it, we who live in the midst of rural Shropshire. In fact, when we drove out of Bishop’s Castle last Saturday, it was quite a shock: wherever you looked the wheat and barley fields lay shorn, the straw baled, or rolled in roundels, the remnant stubble pale and parched. Fields stripped.

How could we have missed so much activity and industry. Did we not hear the combines’ drone?

Along the lanes, too, the hedgerows had that dull and dusty out-grown look of late September. Dock and hogweed gone to seed: russet and deep umber shades of autumn. And again: how could this be? Had we been asleep, Rip-Van-Winkel-like, and lost a chunk of summer? Or had time skipped a month or two?

No. Simply distraction on the home front, gardening and household pursuits. Letting the world pass us by through weeks of day-on-day sun and rainlessness, which of course is the reason why the harvest was so early.

But now it has me reflecting on the beguiling looks of stubble fields, and thus a posting of photos of harvests past, of pared down textures, bare lines and simple colour palette of monocrop farming. I find myself attracted to the spareness of these humanscapes, although wary, too, of the high high-techery that produces such results. This is not the kind of farming I grew up with, the cut wheat stacked in stooks to dry, the arrival of the threshing machine, a monstrous sight over our garden wall, the contraption that, hung in sacking shrouds, throbbed and shuddered, spewing out clouds of chaff as it garnered precious grains from stalks and husks.

Hey-ho. More time slippage.

[The header and final photos were taken mid-September last year above Bishop’s Castle. The in-between shots are from Townsend Meadow, below Wenlock Edge]

Lens-Artists: Lines, colours, patterns Johnbo asks us to explore these tools of photo composition.

Serenity ~ Inside And Out

There are vistas that manifest serenity – at least as seen through human eyes. (I mean who knows what fervid biological imperatives are playing out beneath the calm surfaces of things).

This distant view of the Great Orme from Anglesey was shot on a late December day, the air so still there is barely the hint of a tide. No clouds either, and the sun warm enough to go coatless and believe the seasons have fast-forwarded to June.

Another ‘still waters’ scene. An end-of-summer sunset in Kalamata. I watch a naked man wade into the rose-tinted shallows of the Messenian Gulf, talking on his cell phone.

And a third sea-serenity scene: another December, this time long ago, a tropic summer afternoon on the Manda Strait; Lamu, dhow captain Mzee Lali dreams.

Then there are things that induce a sense of serenity in me. This unruffled cloud for instance…

The close-up view of hawthorn blossom and the scent of lilac…

The gentle fragrance of bean flowers and pleasing thoughts of beans to come…

And the all embracing company of trees…

…whatever the season…

Lens-Artists: Serenity This week Egidio at Through Brazilian Eyes sets the theme. Please pay him a visit.

Breaking the rules: more by accident than on purpose…

I’m not sure what was going on when I took this photo. An unintended composition, methinks: camera aslant; subject leaving the scene; shooting into the sun. An all round combination of errors, but then I also quite like the end result.

Here both the camera person and the subject were on the move, in other words, me snatching this shot of an uphill cyclist through the car windscreen; caught on a bend in the Llanberis Pass, North Wales.

Next at Plas Newydd, Anglesey in late December, taking a photo when there wasn’t enough light and leaving a twig in the way:

Taken on Newborough Beach back in March: too much negatives space; subject out of focus and also leaving the frame. But then that’s kite-flying for you.

And camera on the wrong setting for a winter’s day on Seaton Beach, Cornwall. It seems to have created an oil painting effect:

And last but not least of strange creations:

It took me a while to work out what I’d done here. Basically it’s a photo of a frosted spider’s web stretched outside the window of other half’s old Wenlock shed. But you can see both the shed interior and the reflection off the window which seems to show neighbouring rooftops and some of the garden.

Lens-Artists: Break the rules This week Ritva tells us to break the rules. See her post for some inspiration.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge