I had a couple of hours free on Saturday while Emily slept. As usual, I was itching to get out and take pictures and as usual, I wasn’t really sure what to take them of. So I gathered up some gear and headed to nearby Bradgate Park to see what damage Storm Doris had done.

I’d ridden to work along the main road through the park the previous day, and seen one of the big old firs had come down in the winds. I was anxious to see if the ancient oak that stands high on the hill overlooking the park was still upright. It’s the tree that I photographed as part of and assignment on my (aborted) photography course a couple of years back and having spent that couple of hours trying to photograph it, had developed an… erm… affection(?) for it!

Sure enough, it was still standing and looking as healthy has it done for a hundred years or so. I fitted a 10-stop filter to my Fuji GW690ii and shot this 55 second exposure (and the one below), trying to catch the movement of the clouds and to imply a strong wind. It succeeded on the first, but only having slow-moving, high cloud in the second frame meant that it was less effective.

Once again, Fujifilm’s Neopan Acros was pretty faultless, even at long exposures like this. I have a piece of card that I carry along with the 10-stop filter that has the revised shutter times when using the ‘black glass’. This metered at 1/20th of a second at f/16 but needed almost a minute, so dark is the glass.

I’ve mentioned it before, but Acros can be shot at metered (or calculated) exposures of up to a couple of minutes before any further factoring in of reciprocity is needed. For lazy photographers like me, that makes things much more straight forward.

A few more snaps of a few more trees as I headed back down the hill to the van. For me, creating interesting composition is the most challenging part of landscape photography, and I need a lot more practice.

Bradgate is like a tiny piece of the Peak District in Leicestershire and I always enjoy visiting, especially when I get up the hill and away from the crowds in the valley. Even better when the weather is bad and the chavs aren’t exercising their dogs by letting them chase the deer. I really should go more often.

By the time I got home, Emily was up and ready for action – we spent a bit of time in the garden and she was good enough to pose for the last frame of the roll…

Gubbins:

Fuji GW690ii, Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100, processed in Ilford Ilfotec HC at 1:31 for 6 minutes. Scanned at home…