Photos as slow as nature

Following on from the digital photos from my Christmas Eve visit to Kingley Vale I can now share the pinhole images I took that day. Pinhole photography is a slow process at the best of times, but in the low dark spaces beneath the ancient yew trees some of my photos seemed to take almost as long as the trees did to grow!

I had a feeling the creeping forms of these trees might be a great subject for the otherworldly look of pinhole photography and I think my gut instinct was right. I’d be interested to see the same trees with some low, raking winter sun, but the overcast conditions were almost certainly easier to manage from a photographic point of view.

Click on any image to see it enlarged.

The ground was pretty bare beneath the trees but this fern caught my eye as an ideal subject for some close up photography.

My favourite tree is definitely this one, whose branches stretch endlessly outwards.Even my super-wide angle pinhole camera couldn’t encompass its full reach!

Photos taken 24 December 2022

Walking through history

The Kingley Vale nature reserve is a place I’ve wanted to revisit for many years and Christmas Eve finally brought me an opportunity - about a quarter of a century since my last walk here. The yew trees here are simply astonishing - many of them over 500 years old and contorted in the most amazing shapes.

My intention was to take pinhole photos of these wonderful trees, but I snapped some digital images along the way too. I’m not very good at multitasking with two different cameras simultaneously as the process of pinhole photography is so immersive. Although I had a digital camera in my backpack I ended up taking some snaps on my iPhone as it was easier to wrangle, alongside my tripod, and I’m pleasantly surprised how well these came out in such gloomy conditions. I’ll share the pinhole images here in a day or two.

Click on any image to see it enlarged.

A behind the scenes image as I photographed a beautiful fern

An iPhone panorama - the only way I could get close to photographing the whole of this astonishing yew tree! Click to see it larger.

Photos taken 24 December 2022

Where boats go to die....

Pin Mill is a popular location for East Anglian photographers. It’s home to a boat graveyard - a spot along the edge of the River Orwell where lots of wooden vessels have been left to quietly rot away. Decay is almost always photogenic and this spot had long been on my must visit list.

Through the wonders of social media I’ve got to know lots of other pinhole photographers so on this occasion I met up with Andrew Keedle, who lives not far from Pin Mill in Suffolk. We spent a most enjoyable morning exploring the wrecks together, figuring out what would suit this slow medium best.

With an ultra wide focal length, it pays to get really close to your subject with pinhole cameras and I played with just how close I could get to some of the boats without sinking into the mud!

After a spot of lunch Andrew took me to one of his favourite locations, the Orwell Country Park which runs alongside the river. Here I crept beneath the canopy to capture a vertiginous view of the trees above, as well as photographing an amazing ancient oak tree.

Photos taken on 24 March 2022.