Weon

As I rolled over in bed this morning, wearily trying to turn my alarm off, I pondered to my semi-concious self "Why on earth is my alarm going off at 4:30am?". A vague recollection forced it's way to the surface of my mind and I remembered that I had arranged to go to the Forest of Dean with SBG in order to take some pictures. We wanted to be there before sunrise and therefore needed to set off from Cheltenham at 5am.

I forced myself out of bed and pulled on my clothes. A TMNT base layer was required as photography is hardly an action sport. I rolled across town to pick up SBG and we left Cheltenham to the Postmen. Much of the journey was spent berating ourselves for getting up so early but I think that we both secretly felt proud that we were going to suffer for our art!

We arrived at the FoD to find it shut so we parked in a layby and hopped the gate and strolled through the pre-dawn murkiness to find the lake. It is amazing how much noise there is in nature. Cities and towns can be fairly noisy, esepcially with the traffic giving off all that white noise, but the dawn chorus (and the bird song that continues after) is surprisingly loud. However, I would much rather listen to that than the incessant drone of the internal combustion engine.

So we wondered round the lake, snapping whatever caught our eye. As the sun came up the shutter speeds increased and the apertures dropped. There were several small waterfalls that meant we could play with long exposure times to get that motion blur effect on the moving water.

We were out for about 3 hours and by the end of it I couldn't feel my hands. The rest of me was fine but my hands were frozen! Luckily I had remembered to pack a flask of tea (how English am I?) but unluckily it turns out that our flask can't keep tea warm for more than 3 hours. Great. Still, upon our return to Cheltenham, SBG and I tucked into a lovely MacDonald's breakfast while we sat and chatted about music, movies, ladies shoes and gay-bar tops (SBG appeared to be wearing both of the last two in that list).

Some of my (raw) shots are available via the gallery. The rest I have binned. If I think of it I'll chuck a few of the final, re-touched images up once done.

While my fingers still haven't recovered, my new laptop arrived this morning so I have been able to spend most of this afternoon setting it up. Why is it when you buy a new PC it comes loaded with all kinds of crap? I can't believe that AOL is still being bundled with PCs!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Friends/Family, Free Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.