Return to Winspit

Once more a clear night has... dusked, so with Windspit quarry still fresh in my mind I had to plan a revisit.

This time the weather would be a little windy, which I took to be northerly so I was hoping to be shielded by the cliffs, also the moon would not raise until the shortly before dawn so I was expecting a truly dark evening.

This time I snagged a couple of quick noisey shots of the sight you see as you turn into the quarry.

This time I wanted to put a bit more focus on the caves, some of them are quite large but getting a good night-sky angle from inside one with sufficiently interesting detail in the foreground and a busy enough scape of stars in the background was quite difficult.

Due to the volume of images and some animations please click the following link to read further...

This first set was shot in a fairly shallow cave comparatively and almost in the mouth of it.

The animated gif above shows an uncut sequence of shots from in the cave. I'm still trying to work out why the colour balanc appears to fluctuate in the sky. I'm not sure if it's because we were wondering around with torches nearby but we were quite careful. It's a shame but it will be worth finding out the cause for future shoots.

This next set of shots was an attempt at shooting the main outcropping of stone that forms the main feature of the cliff face towering above all else.

The main difficulty with the shot was simply lighting it. Without a glimmer of moon-light to be had we had to run around with torches and flashing it with my flashgun. In retrospect there's some pretty heavy shadow cast but I'm quite happy with it, next time I'll be sure to regard my compass so as to align the north star a bit better.

The following few shots are a spot of the usual glow-stick tomfoolery.

So after shooting the main section of the cliff-face the wind was getting to us a bit so we took refuge in one of the main caves.

Here's a brightly lit shot so you can get an idea of what it would look like in the day and have an idea of how big it is. You can see how it's filled with the occasional stone pillar that is presumably all that holds the weight of the cliffs up.

Then I started playing around lighting the caves up.
Placing some glow-sticks stationary behind the pillars to provide a sense of depth and then performing the occasional bit of light painting to entertain myself.

Then we packed up and headed home. The harshest part of this location is the trip home as it's up hill the entire way. Before that though I snagged one more quick shot of the main outcropping of the cliff-face.