On Friday I visited Bournemouth and travelled there by train. I snapped a couple of shots of Southampton’s industrial area as we rolled by. James Corner, over at Country Corners, recently posted some photos of an industrial view near his home. He reminded me that a photographer should not automatically ignore the less ‘pretty’ landscapes. A more subtle, panoramic shot below.
St. Aubin, Jersey
But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September. It stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
― Stephen King, Salem’s Lot
Windsor, England
Clandon, Surrey
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
― Robert Frost
Windsor Great Park
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn–that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness–that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
― Jane Austen, Persuasion
At the risk of boring everyone, I thought I’d post some more pictures of La Corbiere, Jersey’s iconic lighthouse. Reached by a causeway at low tide (a claxon sounds to warn visitors foolish enough to ignore a rising tide), the lighthouse is attractively perched atop a granite outcrop, high above the Southwestern tip of Jersey’s coast.
It’s an attractive spot for watching sunset but, even if the sun does not put in an appearance, the view is stunning and the rocky foreshore provides plenty of nooks and crannies as foreground interest for the intrepid photographer.
One day I hope to be there in a storm to catch waves crashing over the lighthouse. In the meantime, however, here are some more shots taken at this lovely, windswept place.
I had to bring my week of Autumn themed posts to an end with this shot from Painshill Park in Cobham, Surrey, a personal favourite location.
Another photo from my evening shoot at Kimmeridge Bay last month. The iconic landmark on the headland is Clavell’s Tower.
Built in 1830 by Reverend Clavell as an observatory and folly, the tower has inspired writers ever since. Thomas Hardy took his sweetheart, Eliza Nicholl, to the tower and included an illustration of it in his Wessex Poems. It was also the inspiration for P. D. James’s novel, The Black Tower and was used as a location in the television adaptation of the story. Moreover, it appeared in the music video for The Style Council’s single, ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’.
Between 2006 and 2008 the whole tower was painstakingly moved, stone by stone, 25 metres inland to save it from cliff erosion that threatened to send it crashing into the Bay. It is now operated as a holiday let by The Landmark Trust.
This is another photograph I took at Kimmeridge on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, one of the UK’s ‘honeypot’ landscape photography locations. In the absence of Kimmeridge’s famed sunsets, I aimed to make the most of the rock formations in this composition.
Certain iconic locations for landscape photography are known as ‘honeypot’ sites. Kimmeridge Bay on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast is one such site. I visited it for the first time on holiday this summer. Sadly, I was not treated to one of the spectacular sunsets one sees so often captured at this location but I made the best of what I had. There was only one other photographer on the beach, a local, who told me that if there had been the merest whiff of a good sunset the beach would have been heaving with tripods etc. Perhaps I was lucky after all.
Our visit to Jersey gave me an opportunity to add to my castle series. Grosnez Castle was built in the 14th century. Little remains of the castle but it makes a very atmospheric ruin, perched atop the headland at the Northwest corner of the island.
‘Grosnez’ comes from the old Norse, grar nes, meaning ‘grey headland’, rather than the French for ‘big nose’. According to an interpretation board at the site, the castle was probably built in around 1330. It was taken by the French in 1373 and 1381 and was likely demolished during or shortly after the French occupation of 1461-8.
The castle certainly has a commanding view of the Jersey coast. Just along the headland stands another martial construction taking advantage of those views, a German WW2 range-finder tower, part of Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’.
It is a strangely forbidding construction, a stark contrast to the tapestry of heather and wildflowers at its base. The two structures together are a reminder of Jersey’s history of occupation, straddling some of her most beautiful landscape.
This image is a little more arty than my usual style but, despite appearances, it is still a photograph. It is made from three exposures, one sharp:
one panned:
and the third, a ‘texture’ made from a close up of the whitewashed walls of the cottage:
The cottage is Le Don Hilton, also known as La Caumine de Marie Best. It stands on the wall above St.Ouen’s beach with spectacular views of the surf and sunsets. It can be rented from Jersey Heritage and makes a charming, if basic, base for surfers. A more straightforward shot of the cottage appears in my earlier post, Jersey Shores.
Focused Moments 