A bit of random roundup from me this week. All processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23.
Wheelton Wander
The week began with a pleasant lunch with friends, followed by a wander around Wheelton to work it off. This took us along some quite unfamiliar paths, down slippery slopes and through nettles. The camera on this particular trip was the little X-T50 attached to the honking great 16-55 f/2.8. Normally I'd describe a lens as being attached to a body, but in this instance it was more the other way around. I've had iffy results with this lens on the other Fuji X cameras I've owned in the past, particularly in terms of unreliable AF, but here it turned in decent results, although it somewhat undermines the compact nature of the body and having this combo dangling off a wrist strap for over an hour lead to a sore elbow joint, so in future I'm probably going back to the literal bag of primes when using this camera rather than the metaphorical one.
St. Barnabas Church on the imaginatively named Chapel Lane. Back in the days before my health started to fall apart and I could run, our running group used to refer to this location as "cardiac hill". Nowadays, just walking up here I can see why!
Just down the hill from the church there's a small gate leading into a field. The view from there looks across the North end of Chorley, featuring the iconic Mormon Temple.
In the end, we crossed the lane and headed down some heavily overgrown paths where trousers were no defence from nettles, thistles and brambles. This eventually led to an extremely steep and muddy slope that I was half expecting to end up sliding down. At the bottom of the valley was this tree beginning to reveal its autumn colours.
As we scrambled to the top of the opposite side of the valley, we were besieged by a group of goats, not something you see a lot of around here. I'm always slightly wary of livestock that's armed (or the weight of an SUV in the case of cattle), but these seemed more inquisitive than anything and made sure to escort us across the field.
Return To The Woods
The next day I felt it had been far too long since I'd had a wander around Brinscall Woods, so I headed there with the GFX100S and tripod. Busy woodland really aggravates my current (and possibly permanent) visual perception issues, but I persevered and still had an enjoyable couple of hours wandering around the woods, although this was slightly marred by slipping on a booby trapped slab of wet, angled stone and landing on my camera. Fortunately the only thing damaged seems to be the circular polariser that was on there at the time, otherwise that might have been an expensive tumble, although CPL's aren't something I want to be replacing every week either.
There are a lot of freshly fallen trees scattered around the woods after the recent storms (I say recent, probably the last few months worth of storms, now that I think about it), although this particular collection of deadfall looks like it's been there for some time.
Running across this shot is what would have at one time been the main track through the woods, but it's largely unused these days, not to mention about a foot deep in bog that's washed down onto it from the slope above over the years.
As I picked my way along the boggy path, I eventually came across this scene. I think I've photographed it before, but the backlight on the central tree was rather nice on this occasion.
Rivington At Sunset
With the weekend behind me, it was a matter of finding evenings after work where the weather wasn't abysmal, so I could head out to make the most of the few remaining weeks before the clocks change and evening walks become far less likely. On this occasion, the conditions were looking good for a nice sunset, so I decided to visit Rivington Terraced Gardens, another spot I haven't been to for a while, with a particular sunset shot in mind.
As I left the car park, I was quite taken with the soft light on Harrock Hill in the distance. The pile of logs aren't something I've seen there before, I think they're doing a bit of woodland maintenance ahead of the festival of light thing that's on this weekend.
A favourite view from the top of the steps that lead up through the woods from Lever Bridge to the summer house just below the pigeon tower.
Looking down from the foot of the pigeon tower as sunset approached. The light was still reasonably nice, but that damned Irish Sea Perma-fog™ is clearly massing on the horizon to crush my dreams, or more likely, rob me of a nice sunset.
The pigeon tower stands at the very top of the gardens and can be seen poking out above the woodland for miles around. In recent times, as part of the renovation of the gardens, they've installed steel safety rails around the various low walls that can be found throughout the place. These can be seen in the foreground. They're really rusty, so they might save you from a deadly fall, but you could get Tetanus off them should you find a sharp edge. I've darkened and desaturated them a bit to make them less intrusive. Having said that, they're only a few inches higher than the actual wall, so how much extra protection from danger of death they provide is debatable. Still, at least they haven't gone completely insane (yet) and installed six foot chain link fences around everything. Give them time.
My plan was to set up a sunset shot at the pigeon tower, but as the sun sank into the swirling sea smog, sucking any semblance of saturation from the scene, I realised that wasn't going to happen, so I headed down an unfamiliar path into the woods, where I found this quite nicely lit tree.
To my surprise, as I picked my way through the woods, I noticed some colour developing on the horizon. It seemed the fog bank was somewhat thinner closer to the horizon than I'd anticipated and the sun was starting to break through, so I found myself scrambling for a half decent viewpoint to capture it. This is about as good as it got from where I was stood.
Underwhelming Aurora
And so, we're onto Thursday night. The number of things that need to perfectly align for an aurora picture are quite staggering. Not only do you need a vast quantity of dangerous high energy charged particles to be thrown your way, or a handy geomagnetic field to shield you from them and stop your atmosphere being stripped away, but you also need clear dark, skies, low light pollution and this all to happen at a convenient time when you're not asleep.
It's not very often that we get visible aurora this far South in England (technically, Chorley is in Northern England, but usually, you need to be really Northern to see these things), as a result I'd never really seen one before the spectacular show we were treated to back in May, so it was a real shock when, while visiting my mum, I saw an article on the news talking about chances of seeing them again that evening. This was around 7PM and the sun had set about 40 minutes earlier, so I was quite surprised when I stepped out of her back door and saw the tell tale hazy look in the sky that I saw back in May. I pointed my phone to the dark sky and was treated to a colourful display of blue, green and red splodges across the sky.
Obviously, my mum's back yard wasn't what I had in mind for a nice aurora shot, so I headed home, picked up a tripod, the Nikon Z8 and the 14-30 f/4S, then set off into the nearby countryside, treating my mum to a little aurora hunting adventure in the process.
First stop was Anglezarke. The normal car parks were all a bit busy, so I headed down to the dam at the South end of Anglezarke reservoir. Disappointingly, the spectacular colours I'd seen earlier in the yard were nowhere to be seen, the only available colour was pea soup green. Still, it was a pleasant view, if a bit colder than May (3°C).
After hanging around at the reservoir for a while, we headed back towards Chorley via Nickleton Brow, where I stopped to take this shot. Still no significant structure in the aurora or variety of colour.
I dropped my mum back home and while there took another look out of the back door, sure enough, things were looking a lot more spectacular, with red shafts shooting into the sky that you could clearly see with the naked eye, a real thrill for my mum who had never seen the aurora before in all of her 75 years and, for the best view, hadn't even needed to leave her home, although she'd enjoyed traipsing around the countryside with me.
Leaving my mum's, I decided to make one last detour up to Wheelton, where I popped by St. Barnabas (the church from the beginning of this rambling diatribe) and took this shot. Once again, outside of my mum's back yard, the aurora was weak, but you can see it faintly behind the church and there's a bit of alternate colour going on there too rather than plain old green.
Prior to last may I'd have been thrilled with these shots, but that experience was off the charts (along with the field strength), so it's going to take something really impressive to beat that, although I've added a few more varied locations to the roster of good aurora shooting spots around here, should they reappear again.
Ironically, the field strength had been wavering between 450 - 800nT while I'd been out and after seeing it fall off dramatically while I was at the church, I headed home and started going through what I'd shot. The morning after, when I checked the geomagnetic activity plot at Aurorawatch for the night, it had shot up to 1,500nT almost as soon as I'd got home and locked the door! So I missed the best hour of the night, even though I was still up going through the pictures and completely oblivious. Bloody typical.
