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3 views along the path

here's the first 3 shots I've processed from a walk last weekend, I haven't been hiking much in the last weeks, so it's good to get started again :-)

Alto Adige Romanesque

We were up in the Austrian part of Italy to conclude a financial matter, but at the same time, I managed to see a little of a couple of places on my Romanesque hit list. I was with my wife, so the photography was a bit rushed. Photography, is something best done alone unfortunately.

We stopped off in Termeno, in the heart of the wine growing area in Alto Adige. I wanted to see the "Chiesa Madre di San Giacomo di Castellaz", with its strange late Romanesque frescoes. Entering this tiny little church is a big surprise, when you see the richness of the frescoes. I was a bit pushed for time and the light inside was difficult. It is just a couple of hours up the Autostrada, so I think I will return here and also visit couple of other similar locations, with more time to explore the place photographically. We stocked up with wine from the numerous "Cantine", down in the village.

Down memory lane

I visited open air museum, which contains mostly old farm houses from all corners of country. But to my interest was building which was brought there recently and represented typical kolkhoz apartment building from 1960 for dairy barn workers. Such apartments were quite common in country villages during soviet era.

View of building. You can see places where it was cut into pieces and later connected again.

Typical cellar box, there was one for each apartment, as pantry and place to store different stuff. Such boxes are in cellars of most buildings from soviet era.

In that building were 4 differently furnished apartments: from 60-ies, 70-ies, 90-ies and 2010. Latter was completely renovated and was not much different from newly built apartments. But first 3 seemed to be quite authentic, including smell of apartments: in soviet era ventilation was in apartments quite minimal, only intake was through window frames, so all the kitchen cooking and other smells accumulated over years. Following photos are from 90-ies apartment, it represents sorry state of many farm workers after gaining independence from soviet union: their mostly manual work was not needed any more and their living went down, lot of men started drinking.

Toilet room

Living room. This yellow-brownish floor colour was quite common, either this or darker brown were 2 most common options for floor paints.

Bathroom.

Royal spirit and and Mehukatti, finnish orange juice, this mix was quite popular in 90-ies.

Typical kitchen table view from people who "were between cogs of life", as saying goes here.

Kitchen with wooden stove

Sectional cabinet in living room. Such cabinet was in almost every apartment

Such carpet filled with badges and pennants was also quite common, I had one when I was child.

Outerwear from soviet era.

Wow, I can smell the clean air in that second shot.
And the third made me feel a bit Julie Andrews.

That all sounds very Godfather -esque.
I love that little church with its single window.
The frescoes are amazing. The sea serpent biting a leg, the racy mermaid and the poor, naked woman seemingly holding up the beams.

Loved this series Vahur. You and the Olympus captured the lighting well. Some absolutely fascinating details in these.
I was reminded of a post-Chernobyl setting.

Now, which one will fit?

Aberfoyle Antique Market outside Toronto.

Vertigo anyone?

Love that one.

Same here. Just incredible.

Just incredible assortment of images.

Return To The Bluebell Woods

I had a nice little set of images that I was quite happy with, all ready to go from a walk in the woods earlier this week, but then I made the mistake of going out again last night and ended up with these images instead.

All images taken with the GFX100S on a tripod, equipped with either the 20-35 f/4 or 45-100 f/4 plus a CPL. Processed from individual raw file in Capture One Pro 23.

Caught In The Spotlight

The shots from earlier in the week were more of the usual woodland images that just happened to have some bluebells in them. This time around I wanted to get in closer and focus on these elusive little flowers themselves, which is out of my comfort zone in more ways than one, particularly in the knees department. I shot quite a lot of these intimate portraits, but to be honest I'm not happy with many of them, this is one of the rare ones I like.

Above The Parapet

Looking for close up compositions is quite a different challenge to my usual woodland observation techniques. In the case of bluebells, I just tended to look for groups with open space in the background, picked out by light breaking through the woodland canopy. I did take some shots of flowers around the base of trees, but I'm not really satisfied with most of them. This one kind of works, but it's nothing special. After as much knee grumbling as I could take, I gave up and returned to my default behaviour of looking for woodland images that happen to have bluebells in them.

Indiana Jones and the Bluebells of Doom

This meadow of bluebells looked pretty nice, but I couldn't find a particularly nice way to frame it, so I thought, "I know, I'll try sticking a person the shot" and, being the only person around, I got the job. I'd like to say I was getting a nice rest leaning against that tree after all of that kneeling on the woodland floor nonsense I'd been doing earlier, but unfortunately, with a maximum 10 second timer and a strip of semi quagmire to cross to get in position, there wasn't a lot of rest to be had taking this.

This was the 4th attempt at nailing this. The first attempt had me stood in hero pose over to the right, with one foot on the wall, which didn't look right somehow. Take 2 had me square in the middle of the frame, completely hiding the bluebells I was supposedly photographing. Take 3 was similar to this, but I'd chosen my reference focus point poorly and was a bit fuzzy as a result, but on this 4th attempt I was more or less happy, either that or just fed up with trying. Taking decent pictures of yourself is hard, but, as my experience over the years has taught me, if you can, it's generally much better to do it yourself than handing your camera to someone else (I've got an extensive back catalog of pictures taken of me at the top of mountains by friends and strangers using my camera that are very, very suboptimal).

At this point, I think I'd been wandering around the lower woods for about two hours and was getting ready to head back to the car, but here, I'm stood on what was once one of the main cart tracks through the area, it's flooded with mud nowadays that washes down the slopes into here and collects due to the stone walls lining the track, but fortunately that was only a bit squishy due to the lack of rain we've had over the past couple of weeks. From this spot, it's only a short walk up the track to reach the upper woods, an area which I tend not to frequent these days, I can't think why, but I wonder if it being at the top of the hill and being quite unfit have anything to do with that? Anyway, I decided to head up the path and take a look around the upper woods, to see if anything interesting could be found.

A Narrow Old Track

On the way up the main track, there's a little branch that heads back downhill. I assume this was a cart track, but it's quite narrow and on the historic maps (1830ish) it doesn't seem to lead anywhere, mind you, back then, this was all fields, so perhaps it was just an access track to reach the lower fields at the bottom of the hill?

Into The Upper Woods

As I've mentioned before, Brinscall Woods is kind of split into two halves by a well maintained path that runs between them. The upper woods as I've called it, is to the East of this path, lying between the path and the open moor. On modern maps, this is known as The Wheelton Plantation and is largely covered in Pine, however, back in the days before the nearby reservoirs were built and this land all became part of the water catchment area, it would have been open moor, with a number of small farms dotted around it.

Here, I'm heading towards the ruins of Heaton House farm. I've not explored this area extensively, really just walked through it occasionally, but I don't think there's a lot left of the farm, mostly just a few boundary walls, but by the time I got up here, I was in the last 90 minutes or so before sunset, so the light was getting quite low and casting long shadows wherever there was a gap in the woodland canopy.

Beyond this area, the pine woods loomed, dark and forboding. I didn't think I'd find much of interest up there on this evening, so I decided to head back the way I'd come and then branch off back up the slope, but slightly further North where another ruin can be found. But first, another shot from a little further up the path.

Back Down The Path

As I headed back down the path, I quite liked the look of the tree I'd photographed on the way up, but from its other side where there was a nice cluster of bluebells around its roots. I think I ended up back on my knees again taking this, they certainly didn't thank me when stood up afterwards.

Hatch Place

Hatch Place once stood a little to the North East of Heaton House Farm, presumably named after the stream it stood beside (home of the (in)famous Hatch Brook waterfall that's lured many a day tripper to their doom, expecting to be thrilled by this spectacle of nature, only to either not find it or be disappointed by something a lot less impressive than the pictures available on Google would lead you to expect). Again, there's not much to be seen of the original farm nowadays, but the low stone walls provide excellent shelter for meadows of bluebells dotted around this part of the woods.

By this time, the sun was rapidly sinking towards the horizon. This is more or less taken from the same spot as the previous shot mere minutes later, but you can see how much the light in the foliage has changed.

Into The Sun

This was the view as I headed back down the path I'd just come up. I quite liked the long shadows that were now being cast across the meadows of bluebells.

A Bit of a Reach

I spotted this tree on my way back down through the lower part of the woods, it overhangs one of the main paths. In the fading light, it looks like it's reaching out to grab you.

I feel quite dizzy looking at this shot.

How did you get this one?

Looks like it has been hot on your side of the Alps too. I need to get up into the mountains too.

I spent some time with these this morning. I really enjoyed this set, depicting another world in another time. It is difficult for us in Western Europe to immagine life in the East before the Berlin Wall came down. This set does a little to get past the stereotypes of life under Communism.

I was surprised a few years when I had a job to do in a steelworks in what was Eastern Germany. The workers houses were not so grey as I expected, and I guess the more senior workers, had nice bungalows with gardens.

Nobody's getting inside there.