I am currently working on the photography and sound from a production day in mid Summer at Troserch Woodland, Carmarthenshire, South Wales.
The unique field recording of the walk is absolutely essential if a sense of the location is to be conveyed. This sound clip near the start of the walk has a time stamp of 4:43 on the morning of 20th July and whilst the the images remind me of what the sky looked like and that there was a horse in the field, the recorded sounds take me (and you too, I hope) straight to the time and place and give me so much more information.
Walking in the woods the other day revealed a range of fungi, but I am no expert in the identification of the various species. Can anyone name all these fungi?
Strictly speaking of course, these are not specifically pond plants. However, they are all plants that were found close to the pond and woodland environment in Three Crosses where we went dragonfly hunting last week (see earlier posts).
Those dragonflies from yesterdays post were hunted and found in two places – Three Crosses Community Woodland near Swansea and Gelli Hir Woodland on the northern side of the Gower Peninsula.
Both places are beautiful and the weather was perfect for finding what we were after. I wasn’t doing any sound recording on this visit but I will be going back, so yet again, watch this space!
StillWalks is about promoting a sense of health and wellbeing, enjoying the sights and sounds of your local environment. Both the Three Crosses and the Gelli Hir woodlands are places that I will be visiting again with the assurance that, whatever the weather, I will enjoying a sense of wellbeing while I am there.
Swansea Countryside Connections Team, through which StillWalks ran the Sights and Sounds of the Countryside project, put on a number of events throughout the year for those living in eligible rural wards in Swansea. It was one of their dawn chorus walks where I first met Helen Grey and it was she, along with Tim Orrell, who was leading the Nature Detective Walk along the Gower Way from Felindre to Lower Lliw Reservoir last Wednesday evening. See the photos below.
As this was the route taken by the Sights and Sounds project on the production day for the Felindre Families group, I thought it would be good to go along – and indeed it was! I discovered what the funny lumps and bumps are in the first field we crossed. We found a very old ash tree with branches twisting and twining round each other, reflecting its age. We saw Deadly Nightshade amongst other plants and flowers, a badger set, mole holes, young Hazelnuts, whin, thistles, ducks, etc., etc.
“Helen, you will have to remind me of that last little yellow flower I asked you about. I cannot remember it it now!”
Yesterday I went through gates, today I am crossing bridges.
Foot bridges can serve a similar role to gates in a StillWalk. Useful as way markers both visually and aurally, the design, materials, condition, sounds – all play a part in identifying a stage in the walk.
Here are two of the foot bridges I encountered on my recce walk of the River Morlais and Troserch woodland with a view to producing a new Summer time StillWalk.
I posted these sounds to all my other social media platforms this morning but held back until now to post it here.
The sounds were recorded during my recce walk for a new StillWalk video along a stretch of recently discovered river and woodland near where I live.
The video will obviously not include the Lancaster Bomber as it won’t be around when I do the actual production walk but it was good to hear on its way home from the annual air show at Swansea.
Still enjoying the short journey home over the hills from Felindre, the local Welsh landscape is beautiful and it’s got nothing to do with the current good weather, honest!
My work over the years has taken me all over South Wales and although this has meant a lot of driving, it has also given me the opportunity to see different aspects of the landscape in all sorts of conditions. Whether it is local or more distant, you have to be there to really appreciate it. Photography can do only so much. Artists can capture moods of a scene with which you can best identify if you have been there or somewhere like it.
I do not describe the photography I do as landscape photography. Although much of it involves the landscape, the photography I do for StillWalks, I describe as environmental – natural and man-made. If you google landscape photography, you will be presented with any amount of spectacular photographs produced by a range of more or less well known photographers who have done all the “right” things in terms of framing the shot and finding the right angle, waiting for the light, etc.
Some of the scenes from around the world (both near and far) are truly amazing . . . yes, there is a but coming . . . but, some of the shots I see seem to me to be almost unreal or super-real, a bit like photo-realism in painting – it’s almost beyond belief. It seems as though there is no texture in the scenes and texture is something I am interested in, no doubt due to my other life as a tapestry weaver. It may be that in these textureless images, there has been some over-use of pixel smoothing techniques but I know of one photographer who does not make this mistake, if it can be called that.
Victor Rakmil is a photographer whose work I greatly admire and he writes an excellent blog much of which I would entirely agree with and learn from regarding technique. Take a look to see the texture that remains in his landscape scenes as well as the other photographic genres he covers.
I took the shots below on my way home over some of the lower lying Welsh hills. It was a hot a hazy day and for me, give a true (photographic) representation of the landscape as it was at that time in those conditions. Tomorrow I’ll have some more!
