I spent a very happy couple of hours this Tuesday at Denbies Wine Estate.
The harvest was mostly over but the vines still glowed in the late Autumn light.
People don’t tend to think of England as a wine-producing country but Denbies, one of our largest wine producers, has had considerable success, including an International Gold for its Noble Harvest Dessert wine.
I may be spending more time on the estate next year. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this selection from Tuesday’s images.
St. Martha’s on the Hill, Chilworth, Surrey.
Life is eternal, and love is immortal,
and death is only a horizon;
and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
~Rossiter Worthington Raymond
I can finally explain why Focused Moments has been so quiet lately. It’s been a long time in the planning but this week my business partner, Tony Antoniou, and I launched our new venture, f11 Workshops.
We are going to be leading photography workshops and tours in Surrey and West Sussex. The photographer is spoilt for choice when it comes to workshops in some of the UK’s more famous beauty spots, like the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, the Lake District, or the Scottish Highlands, but there are few tours elsewhere. Yet there are rewarding locations everywhere if you know where to look. I am really looking forward to introducing other photographers to some of my favourite local places.
Taking small groups of 6-8 maximum, we aim to tread lightly in our chosen locations, leaving nothing behind and taking nothing away but our photographs and some great memories.
I’ll be blogging about our tours as they happen. Plus, now that the business is up and running, I should be able to get back to regular posting, and reading. In the meantime, if you have time, please visit our website. I’d love to know what you think. We are also on Facebook and Twitter.
On Friday, I enjoyed a trip out to Three Farms Meadows with my friend, Tony Antoniou. The landscape here is special because Surrey is a heavily populated county. Open spaces like this are rare and ever more under threat. 
I cannot hope to convey the joy of stepping through the gate onto this vast, open, empty landscape. We spent an hour up there, in the company of skylarks, bees and a pair of red kites soaring overhead.
Sadly, Three Farms Meadows is under very real threat. 2,500 new homes are planned for this site. I understand how desperate the housing situation is in this crowded little country of mine. But still, I cannot help but dread the loss of this precious place. The price seems too high.
One day last month, I managed to get out to Chatley Heath during some early morning mist. The forest of towering scots pines looked spooky in the mist so I gave this image an infrared style treatment. By the early afternoon, the mist had burned off and colour returned.
I love going back to familiar locations and discovering how their mood changes with the season and the light.
Fields of oilseed rape are in full bloom right now.
Oilseed rape is not a subtle crop. Each Spring it blazes out its presence in the English countryside, briefly turning this ‘green and pleasant land’ into something far more extroverted.
I took the opportunity to capture some of its moods twice last week, near Wisley in Surrey and the village of Northchapel in West Sussex. It was interesting how the colour changed with the light, from acid yellow to something far more mellow, with a hint of amber.
The farmer of this field has sown his crop right over one of the many public rights of way that criss-cross the meadows here.
What footpath?
I can’t believe it’s been well over a week since my last post. I am really neglecting Focused Moments at the moment. Shame on me! But there have been good reasons for my lapse. It’s been an eventful few weeks, photographically speaking. There are some really exciting projects beginning to come to the boil but they are time-consuming. I am not ready to write about most of them yet but there will be lots of news in the next few weeks, fingers crossed. In the meantime, I can share a nice little surprise from this morning. One of my images of poppies from last summer is presently featured in the window of a gallery in Barcelona. If you have been around here for a while, you may remember that I love Barcelona, so you can guess how pleased I am. The picture below is courtesy of The Shed Gallery. I wrote a post all about The Shed in the Autumn; you can find it here.
As I am going to be recording lots of news about my photography, I am also going to write occasional posts featuring other photographers and artists whose work I admire. Any small successes I enjoy would never have happened without the inspiration I derive from the work of others and I want to share that here.
Are you on Facebook or Twitter? I have been developing my pages there and would love it if you had time to pop by and say ‘hi’.
50, f/11, 1.3″, 20 mm
Circ. polariser, .6 ND hard grad. and .9 pro glass (I think!)
Another shot from Tuesday’s day out along the Wey Navigation. Was it worth it, capturing this towering weather front, in return for three days of foul weather and counting? Definitely.
A return to bugs tomorrow – this warning is for you, Gunta. 😉
The last couple of days have been really foul here – loads more rain that our already saturated landscape really didn’t need, and unremitting grey skies. But on Tuesday, as the weather front rolled slowly in over the Surrey countryside, Jen and I were treated to some seriously epic skies.
Fortuitously, we had chosen for our weekly photoshoot the Wey Navigation towpath between Cartbridge and Triggs Lock. The Navigation is bounded here by water meadows, open spaces and big skies. We were like the proverbial children in the sweet shop (kids in a candy store in American!). It will take me a while to get through all the images I made but here are the first few out of the digital darkroom. Little editing required thanks to my circ. polariser and ND grad. filters. Colours as they appeared on the day.
Recently I have started to retrace my steps along the Wey Navigation towpath with a view to getting some more up to date pictures for a possible book project. Most of the Navigation runs through pretty countryside but there is one spot, between New Haw and Pyrford, where it runs close to, and is indeed crossed by, the M25, Britain’s busiest motorway. It is not the most picturesque of landscapes but still full of interest for the photographer. I enjoy the challenge of trying to make images here.
Although not conventionally beautiful, this is a very significant spot in the history of transport. Here, within a few paces of its passage under the motorway, the Wey Navigation meets the Basingstoke Canal. The Navigation is not a canal strictly speaking but a river made navigable, and it predates the canal age by some hundred years. Thus the Basingstoke Canal (opened in 1793) represents a later evolution of British transport, although it was never as successful as the Navigation and fell into disuse first. A sign here points to Thames Lock (3 miles), Guildford and Godalming (12 miles) and Greywell Tunnel (31 miles via the Basingstoke Canal).
Immediately after its junction with the canal, the Navigation passes under a bridge that carries the main London to Southampton railway line (1838). The railways of course were a further development and largely responsible for supplanting the canals as the principal means of goods transport.
Then there’s the motorway, the next stage in the development of transport. An iron footbridge next to the railway bridge adds a further layer, albeit rather older and more environmentally sound!
I have had a few funny looks from people during my visits here, and on a couple of occasions people have stopped to ask me what on earth I am photographing. Yet, rather amusingly, I am clearly not the first photog to see potential in this location, although I don’t think I would ever go to such lengths to advertise my Flickr photo stream!
Some people will do anything to get people to look at their photos
In some of my shots I have tried for a desaturated, moody look, to suit the industrial feel of the place.
But sometimes I just can’t resist going for colour. When the late afternoon sun peeps under the motorway, it almost looks pretty.
The next shot does not properly belong here as I took it at Weybridge Station, while waiting to meet my daughter. But it was taken on the same afternoon as some of the earlier pictures, just a few minutes later, and it has got a train in it…
Of all the photographs I have taken here so far, strangely my favourite has no train. I like the simplicity of the brick bridge against the sky. It seemed to demand a contrasty black and white conversion.
ISO 50, 16mm, f/16, 11″
ND .6 Hard Grad, Circ. Polariser, .9 Pro-glass
Focused Moments 