Fairylights and the Devil's Sleeping Hat

Tonight I spent the evening at a new location known as Agglestone Rock.

In local myth it's apparently known as the Devil's Nightcap due to a story that involves the Devil tossing his nightcap towards Corfe Castle and missing. (Because the Devil can never succeed right?)

Apparently it toppled at somepoint and was previously known as the Devil's Anvil, for resembling... an anvil I guess.

I don't think there is a standing stone anywhere in the UK that doesn't have a story involving a devil of some sort.

The site itself is pretty easy to access, a fifteen minute walk I'd guess. The only slightly worrying part is that you have to walk right in front of a golf hole. Thankfully I was passing at night time but in the daytime you'd run the risk of dodging golf-balls, there's another way round that I took unintentionally thankfully.

Anyway my primary goal of the evening was not to scout Agglestone as a location, instead, it was to trial a new bit of lighting I bought recently. Some battery powered fairy-lights. The plan being that I could spin them about and create some man-made spirals to mirror the stars that will trail above.

Feel free to judge for yourself on how that worked out.

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...

A Hamworthy Sunset

This evening was spent down on Hamworthy beach where I could experiment on sunset photography.
Sadly we arrived a bit late so the sun had already set but there was still colour in the sky so I went out of my way to make use of it.

I'm still not great at finding a way to do landscape photography and with the light failing on me I decided i'd stick to more familiar ground and with nothing I could think of to shoot I decided I'd make something. SO, scrabbling around in the wet and the dark I built myself a few stone monoliths to use as foreground.

I liked the way the stars bokeh'd and tried to line them up above my little stone creations.

When headed back to the car it was too tempting not to make use of the jetty again for a couple of shots with a clear sky, quickly, before I had to go home and get some much needed sleep.

A moon-lit evening at Winspit Quarry

So, another new amazing location found on the Jurassic Coast, this one is Winspit Quarry.
On this trip I was joined by two fellow photographers, Chris and Shaun. (Who found and suggested this location and joined me on two recent trips.)

It's a fairly short walk from Worth Matravers and not quite where we expected after having spent quite a while reviewing google maps.
When we hit this sign(left), we turned left as a nearly full moon rose(That's the moon not the sun), which does lead down to the water but was not much use to us. We couldn't find any of the apparent ruined structures that could be seen from the satellite imagery, only some slightly treacherous looking climbs down to the rocks.


So, failing there and deciding not to explore the beach below due to the tide being in and the rocks being uneven and slippery we tried turning right at the sign. Where very shortly after we were greeted by the most amazing sight!


An opening in the cliff side to a  great hollow filled with ruins and lined with caves all lit by the right moon light. There was so much potential we didn't know where/how to start.

Regrettably I didn't get a shot as we arrived to show what we saw but it probably wouldn't be that impressive as a photo it just would've been nice too have to document the occasion.
Here is a panoramic shot of the area though .

Due to the volume of images and the inclusion of some animations I've broken this post up so please click the link to read further:

Hamworthy and the fog

Tonight I joined a colleague from the office to a local site called Hamworthy in Poole.
The weather wasn't going to be good. All reports were saying that it would be cloudy until it was dark and then it would be foggy so we weren't really intending to do anything other than scout out the location for future use and to work out how dark the skies were, we weren't expecting to come away with any decent shots at all really.

As you can see the site is mostly a heath-land sat on a cliff edge, over looking Poole harbour. It's quite a nice spot, worth revisiting on a clear night for a few reasons but it wasn't until we headed back to the car that we found what we'd end up spending the rest of the night shooting.

A jetty.
The jetty itself was a T-shape, one wide, long boardwalk leading up to two smaller ones on the left and right.
The fog started rolling in and the water was calm and still so the boats reflected well and the nearby docks and harbours lit the fog quite dramatically.

Naturally the glowsticks were put to work!

All in all it's an amazing spot, well worth a revisit on both a clear night and a dramatic sunset.
Expect to see more from here.

Until then though here is one of my favourite shots from the trip.
The chap at the end there taking his own photographs is Shaun, who joined me and suggested the location.

Glowsticks on the Jurassic Coast and the clouds part over Lulworth

Another clear night presents itself on a non-school night and so a friend and I decided to try a shoot out.
Not having visited the south coastal areas for a while I picked Kimmeridge as that's where the Met-office implied the weather would be good.

As it turns out the clouds came in thick and fast for the duration so the star shooting was few and far between but it was a beautiful moon-lit night and I was prepared with a pocket full of glowsticks to make the most of the situation.

Following the jump are more images and some animations, to read further please click the link:

Lulworth Castle - Rear Gatehouse

Today I visited a location I was tipped off about a few weeks ago and have been itching to visit on a clear night ever since. Panstarrs managed to distract me significantly most recently.
So when I saw a not-so windy, clear evening, forecast for this weekend and where the temperature wasn't going to be less than -4, I decided to brave the cold and head out!

Now, I did manage to scout the area a week previous, in daylight, as these trips have previously gone poorly when I haven't applied an appropriate level of preparation.

It's a little awkward to get too. The only logical place to park is on the other side of a curving section of road that is on a hill with a blind dip and no verge/pavement.

I'm basically walking on a country road where no driver will be able to spot me until it's too late. Couple that with the fact I intend to walk this section of road in the pitch black makes for a very worrying scenario...
I ran the stretch of road and on my second, night, trip I also waved glow sticks furiously over my head... In a cool way obviously.

This image is of the gates on the north side facing south.
Lulworth Castle is just about visible through the arch on the ride-hand side of the main gate.
So if you haven't guessed already this structure is that of a now unused, gate house, at the rear of the property of Lulworth Castle grounds.
There are public footpaths that run past it which, as I understand it, are not always open but on this occasion they were.

It's a lovely structure and fairly unknown.

This is of the gates from the south side facing north.

The above two images are of inside the two buildings on either side of the gates. The windows were smashed in when I arrived, I didn't enter the buildings my self, I just poked my camera in and the above is what I got.

This was my first shot of the evening and how the gates looked as I first arrived.
That's Lulworth Castle brightly lit in the background. Sadly a bit too brightly lit for me to get in the same exposure. In retrospect I should have tried again with different settings and then composited a single image out of a couple but maybe next time.

The first thing I did was wander around the south side of the gate so I could see if Panstarrs was still visible and whether I could get it in frame above the gates.

That's why the shot is wonky but, right above the lion on the right hand side, the comet can be seen.
It's a little dim even in this image

So, recompose and here we are. Sadly the light pollution to the north drowns out some of the details but I like the image. Aimed a bit higher to remove some of the needless black space beneath the gate houses and took a timelapse sequence.

Just for fun,I grabbed a shot with me in frame under the comet. :)

And some star-trail stacks from the timelapses above:

The lightng provided on the gates was provided by the headlights of the guest leaving whatever event was occurring at Lulworth Castle that night.