Return to Granch Arch

A clear night and its been far far too long since i made a trip out.
To ease back into the groove of star photography I picked an old spot I knew well.
Grange Arch.

The evening was fairly trouble free, there was a slight threat of clouds and it was a little windy but otherwise pleasant.
I set the camera up in a couple of different spots, aiming in the directions I thought would work best. Played around with some coloured lights when I wanted to get a bit more creative with a splash of colour/light and got the following results.

Finally the above shot was the last sequence of the evening. I wanted to have a proper stab at a north-star spiral.
The arch presents some problems as it has lots of trees behind it that prevent you seeing it's shape as well as I'd like and I didn't hold out much  hope for a good shot either as there were plenty of clouds but, as it turns out, the clouds gave a sort of star-bursty effect to the sky which i'm not unhappy with.

Nine Barrow Down - Obelisk

Tonight myself, my sister and my father went out to a new spot I noticed while browsing google maps during my initial route planning for the Agglestone trip.

Again this was just a scouting run, primarily to find the location and secondly to assess it for future use.
It's up on the top of one of several hills in the  among the Purbeck Hills called Nine Barrow Down and is situated above the town of Swanage.
The Obelisk was apparently originally built in 1883(not sure why) but was later taken down during the War as they were worried it would prove to be a landmark for Air Raids. It was later replaced in 1952, slightly shorter than before as I understand it as one section of it is damaged and put to one side. (It may have been replaced)

As it turns out, it's not the greatest spot. Whilst the Obelisk itself is a nice feature to shoot it's located right between Swanage and Bournemouth/Poole which just nukes the sky with light pollution.

The result of this isn't awful pictures but it is a reduced number of stars and it certainly means I'm not going to get the milkyway so much from here. So I cracked out the glowsticks!

A nice clean spin on the fairy-lights... for comparison the next shgot is just a manic, nun-chuck swinging of the fairy-lights.

Then I finally remembered to try out my laser, which is inexplicably part of my emergency battery pack, which I have in case I need to recharge my phone or something in an emergency.

I'm not keen on the results tbh, I'll play with it more another time though. It's easy to make marks with but it's hard to make something that looks nice. I tried writing my name(ignore the backwards "y") which looks fine but it's very scribbly and messy... and not very interesting really.

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.