Winter on the marshes

The weather over the last week has been dreadful here in north Kent.  Ok, so snow makes the country grind to a halt but at least it offers possibilities for strong images but when it’s just blanket grey (sigh) what can you do?  Well, I edit images and prepare them for the agent but eventually you just scream for sun!  I went out at first light this morning hoping for some sunrise shots and the forecast promised a bright day.  Well if it did happen, it certainly wasn’t anywhere near me!  I did get my sunrise shots however and it was nice but it lasted all of 10 minutes and then the cloud rolled over.  So I thought I’d dig out a few images from 3 weeks ago when the light was a little more interesting.

 

Around two months ago I secured permission from the Environment Agency to access their land which connects to a local nature reserve.  It now means rather than getting so far on the reserve then having to turn back, I can now do a loop as it were.  If only there wern’t so many gates!  It was a bitterly cold afternoon, the ground was solid and the sky was clear.  I had spotted this hawthorn some while back and waited for the right conditions in which to illustrate it within its habitat rather than a straight silhouette.

As I drove slowly back across the marsh, light lingered in the sky and as I passed a clump of teasel I thought I would try something a little different.  I enjoy this kind of work, mixing flash with daylight and always use off-camera flash to give the subject modelling.  On this particular instance, with an exposure of 1 second at f8 and the flash set to Auto f8 (not TTL), I set the camera to self timer, walked around to the right then manually set off the flash when the shutter opened.  

Tags: north kent marshes, silhouette, snow, teasel, technique, winter