Tag: night photography

#365daysofbiking Take me home

Saturday November 7th 2020 – Some important bike maintenance tasks and gusty weather kept me busy at home, and I slipped out very late on a test run.

Coming off Lazy Hill and down through Bosses and Footherley, I caught the wind behind me and the speed of empty, but owl-haunted lanes.

The reassuring light of my headlight, some good music on the phone and the joy of quiet, assured speed took me on a night flight home that was rather wonderful.

I did enjoy it so.

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#365daysofbiking Restoring a light in the darkness

Friday November 6th 2020 – The second lockdown is not so far as bad as I feared: With kids at school, people are going to work and there is life and people around.

I kept up my commitment to fresh air and exercise by riding to Lichfield on an important errand, coming back after darkness fell through the little village of Wall.

Wall phone box is an original Giles Gilbert Scott and had been under refurbishment for some time, but is now thankfully fully and beautifully restored and returned to it’s post-mobile era as a community library.

But the best thing about it? It still has a light. So many lost their illumination when transferred to community ownership, but this one has not. As a cyclist of a certain age, the night-time rural beacons that were isolated phone boxes were almost romantic and welcoming to me, and their disappearance makes me sad. To see one restored is a joy to the heart.

Well done, Wall. Well done.

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#365daysofbiking Reflecting on failure

Thursday November 5th 2020 – I went to Chasewater to try to catch bonfire night fireworks, without much success. I’ve never had much luck with long exposure firework images, I guess I don’t have the required attention span.

Chasewater itself though was as gorgeous as ever and the glassy nature of the water and the few sparkles I caught on the horizon were evocative.

Oh well, maybe next year…

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#365daysofbiking Hiding in the dark

Monday November 2nd 2020 – A windy, wet day with little to commend it. I took this photo from Catshill Junction bridge in the pitch dark on a long exposure and it’s not great, but does show the movement in the skyline well.

It was a foul, wet night – it’s rare I leave the towpath to hit the High Street due to mud and slipperiness but I did tonight.

But one thing redeemed the shot: I never realised the swan family were there, hiding in the dark.

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#365daysofbiking Recovery

Saturday, October 31st 2020 – A lazy day spent at home avoiding torrential rain, high winds and attending to bike maintenance issues that had cropped up in the previous day’s long ride.

I had to nip out for shopping so went late to catch the supermarket quiet, and for a change, I decided to go to Morrisons in Burntwood.

Returning via Chasewater, and realising I’d left the SD card from the camera in my computer, I tried a night photo on phone: It didn’t turn out to badly.

I’ve missed Chasewater lately. I must get up there more often.

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#365daysofbiking Taking the Derbyshire hundreds

Friday, October 30th 2020 – There was a weekend of bad weather forecast, so I took the opportunity to get a long ride in – and aimed for a century, to test my fitness.

I achieved 110 miles, and returned to places I’ve not been in some years. I was very pleased, and the ride was exhilarating and beautiful.

It rained a couple of times, and I got wet, but it didn’t matter. Up the A515 to Sudbury, over to Scropton and Hatton, up through Shirley and Hole in the Wall to Hognaston Winn and it’s alien-like navigation beacon via the daunting Madge Hill. Sunset came and followed me up the High Peak Trail from Middleton Top to Parsley Hay, whereupon I headed to Ashbourne on the Tissington Trail in the blackest of nights.

The night run back via Alkmonton, Foston, Tutbury, Barton Gate, Yoxall, Hanch and Chorley was gorgeous and challenging.

Autumn on the trails and lanes of Derbyshire is a bit treacherous, but a fun ride: But as ever, the bleak, beautiful countryside of Derbyshire and East Staffordshire was the star.

It’s great to be back in the game at last. I thought I’d never make it.

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#365daysofbiking Suffocation

Thursday, October 29th 2020 – I had to visit a store at Walsall’s Crown Wharf shipping Centre – a peculiar, strip parade out of town centre that was curiously built in the town centre.

Crown Wharf is awful: Like all parade malls, it surrounds it’s own car park and seems isolated from the town outside, and has sucked the life and larger stores from Park Street a hundred yards away, which is the town’s Main Street.

It’s incredibly brightly lit at night, and the trees on the Wolverhampton Road frontage have lights in all year around, giving a night-time feel of the worst kind of Christmas shopping all year around.

Crown Wharf is one of those odd, turn of the millennium regeneration projects that didn’t regenerate anything much, and seems cursory and contemptuous of it’s host town and environment, almost as if the architects and designers had learned nothing from Merry Hill twenty years before: A mall surrounded by industrial decay that only served to further suffocate the small towns around it.

I did what I had to, and left. I hate this place.

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#365daysofbiking Shine

Saturday, October 24th 2020 – Another wet day, and it was raining heavily as I nipped out for shopping in the evening.

This weekend, the clocks go back and I hate the loss of evening light with a fierce passion. The wet Saturday just compounded that and I felt miserable.

But something about the lights of the town, the fresh air and sounds of the rain combined and I actually began to find it quite soothing.

The shine of rain at night is very underrated, and it can make the most mundane places beautiful. But also this year I am determined not to be brought down by winter. I must keep on, must keep finding the beauty in the everyday, and try myself to shine through the gloom.

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#365daysofbiking Harsh but beautiful

Thursday, October 22nd 2020 – I’m still ambivalent about the iPhone as a camera. It’s a huge advance in photography without a doubt, but outside of it’s quite narrow comfort zone, you can really tell that it’s relying heavily on software post-processing.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the lauded ‘night mode’.

Here on the canal near Silver Street it took a stunning image on my way home from work – yet look closely and it’s very harsh.

I know I’m expecting way to much from something in an incredibly small package with tiny optics, and it is extraordinary, but the technology still has a very long way to go.

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#365daysofbiking Just resting

Wednesday, October 21st 2020 – Also looking good in the royal blue dusk that’s been coinciding with my evening commute is Coppice Lane, alongside Brownhills Common.

A lonely, quiet and often desolate part of Brownhills, an edgeland populated mainly by silver birch copse on scarred industrial land, it has a ghostly, haunted atmosphere at night.

But in the right light, the sky, trees, road and streetlights combine and make it special.

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