Marriage of the Sea - Bournemouth Arts Festival

Bournemouth Arts Festival The Marriage of the Sea.

I was recently invited, by it's organizers, to an event at the Bournemouth Arts Festival called the Marriage of the Sea.
It's a parade that's loosely based on a Venician tradition but given a very old English kind of a twist.
Everything about the parade would appear much like any other wedding except there was no groom and a hundred or so brides to be wedded to and sacrificed to the Sea. The priests and some of the fashion elements had definite Venician inspirations behind them, otherwise the setting was made to reflect a Victorian era.

The events started in Bournemouth's triangle as a man came out dancing with his "bride" singing a song of the sea, shortly after a Victorian peddler-woman offering various fine wares to mark the occasion came out trailed by surreal music..

Shortly after once again a chimney sweep joined them to see what was going on,as he did so the surreal music grew louder.

The three worked the crowd as the audience gathered further, preparing everyone for the events to come.

Want to see what happens next? Well there are so many images in this post i've had to put it behind a break, click to see the full post:

Photograph of the "week" #065

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways. So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

Sadly there isn't much time for me to take advantage of the snow photographically this year as we have travel plans but I did find some time whilst playing with my boy to build my first snowman... I wasn't very good at it as it turns out but in the end the grotesque dog-faced snow-troll grew on me and I thought the carrot was better used as a cigar than a nose. :) Happy snow day everyone!

Photograph of the "week" #064

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways. So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

A boxing day outing to Josselin in france and around Josselin's castle
.
This photo is a stitch of about 12 photos. I'm still a bit flakey at getting the necessary shots for a photo stitch really... You might be able to notice that there are two corners where some heavy editing was used to add otherwise missing details.

Photograph of the "week" #063

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways. So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

Merry Christmas!

Knowlton Church 2

I did a revisit at Knowlton Church last night as I spotted some clear weather and felt I had to take advantage.
Just  quick couple of shots but I'm happy with how they came out. Again I took a series of photos that I can work into a animation at a later date.

Photograph of the week #058

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."
Whoops! I'm four months behind on these.
Though I've not been unproductive in that time with quite a lot of night time photography.
This week though I managed to grab some macro shots of a spider in my garden. He was extemely well lit by a bright sun on clear summers day.

Here's a couple more angles for fun.

Knowlton Church

Tonight I did a quick run to Knowlton Church.
An old ruined church situated in the middle of a barrow henge.

The decision to go out was very last minute as the sky just happened to seem very clear and I'd noticed the next weeks worth of whether was going to be very poor. The site is quite local to me relative to some of the other locations I've been visiting lately so I didn't feel like I was risking much by just having a look.

As it turned out there was a very bright and almost full moon in the southern sky which, while interesting to see how much of an effect it has on the sky, was a bit inconvenient as that's precisely the direction I wanted to face and completely blots out that whole area of sky.

What it does do however is nicely illuminate the subject of the photography. These photographs were shot in the dead of night at 23:00-02:00.
With exposure lengths of thirty seconds the moon-light appears to do as good a job as the sun in lighting up the area.

The return to St Aldhelms Head

So the jet-stream moved north, the clouds cleared and my first truly 100% clear night since I started this astro-photography mission happened upon me almost out of nowhere.

Typically this clear night is on a work night of course. Ignoring that though Shaun and I ventured out in the dead of night to catch falling stars in camera boxes on the cliff tops of the Jurassic Coast.

The trip went much the same as the last one with the exception that we knew where we were going and what we were aiming for only this time armed with a perfectly clear night. The shots below will be familiar, the only exception being that there are no clouds to obscure the view of infinity and it's heavenly bodies.

Next up is the resulting time-lapse video of about two hours shooting.

A bit noisier than I'd like so I tried using a program called Deep Sky Stacker to use the photos in the sequence to stack into a noise-free super single image.

My first attempt at using it(with some post-processing) can be seen below the video. It does give some nice extra detail in the galactic core of the Milky Way and along the band but it also causes other distortions, or emphasizes existing ones. I will need significantly more practice with it but it makes for interesting viewing as a first experiment.

St Aldhelms Head Strike 01

The weather has improved a bit.
Several nights have now been forecast with no clouds and I think I might need to completely re-fabricate my sleeping patterns to make the most of it without wiping me out in the daylight hours for work and parenting.

This evenings location of choice however was a place called St Adhelm's Head.
Once again a location within the Purbecks. It drew my eye as it had the statue seen above. A memorial to the Radar research conducted in the area during the second world war. I felt it's overall design, coupled with it's location, if unlit at night, would lend itself perfectly to the sort of shot I was after and I still believe that would be the case. The only downside was that it was just a little too cloudy. Sadly the forecast for the evening, whilst broadly speaking accurate, did not reflect the reality of events and though a clear night was to be expected a sufficiently inconvenient volume of clouds rolled into shot. As can be seen below.

This above shot is a very noisey shot that I took as a compositional example but turned out to be the best view of the galactic band offered all night.

This shot is an edit-together of a string of five shots that show the trajectory of a satellite.
Eventually the unfortunate cloud cover coupled with a cold wind forced us to move location, slightly disappointed. The location will need revisiting on a clearer night I think.

The resulting time-lapse.

In the Purbecks however, when all hope is lost, I return to an old friend.
Corfe Castle.
This time I've done it a bit more justice than previous trips and even attempted a bit of a photo-stitch.

...Taking notes and talking to your ghost and still staying up all night...

Another night-time visit to the Purbecks on essentially the only clear nights sky for weeks.

This time I went to a place called Creech Hill so I could use the Grange Arch folly as an interesting foreground. I've not been there during daylight before so I was a little concerned about accessibility but I needn't have been.
The only thing I needed was my torch as the footpath approaching the Arch was well trodden and the area around teh Arch was nice and clear. My preferred angles were on a steep hillside but otherwise problem free and a good evenings photography was had.

Photograph of the week #056

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."


After my dawn run to Kimmeridge I managed to get some shots from the local area in frosty conditions. Driving through the Lulworth firing ranges I noticed some ruined tanks on the range and grabbed a shot from the road side.

Photograph of the Week #0036

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

This shot is from my grandmother's garden.
It's just a nice basic, textured, colourful macro-shot.