The StillWalks video below is not from the place I have posting about this last week but is nearby on the Gower Peninsula. The weather forecast for the production day of this video was good – in reality it turned out as you will see in the video, more in keeping with the atmosphere of the misty hills, if not as wet and windy.
If you are looking at this in an email, please click the image below to be able to watch the video on the blog.
The two images below were taken through rain streaming down my car window. The first is rather dark but, having tried some adjustments, I decided not to use them but to leave the original as you see it.
The grass in the foreground is very dark, smeared and blurred by the heavy rain running down the car window. The image had an impact on me when I first looked at it and evokes a mood wholly consistent with the atmosphere in that environment at the time.
I wound the window down and took another shot. In keeping with the atmosphere of the first, I held back on any adjustments.
Another photographer/artist whose work I like and sometimes uses movement and double exposure in her work to create some very effective moods is Karen McRae – you can see her blog at Draw and Shoot
Click the photos to enlarge.
Driving through driving rain is not a pleasant thing to do but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any views worth photographing. I took these shots before setting off on my return journey from the Mawr hills and decided not to do anything with the smudge of rain water on the lens which can be seen to the right of the horizon line.
The weather was bad, the atmosphere gloomy and the landscape dark. The grass on the road verges was perhaps not as dark as is shown in these photos, but the presented atmosphere is certainly accurate to my memory of the scene.
The blades disappeared into the cloud and it was difficult to see even the nearest of these wind turbines through the wind and rain. Whatever you think of wind turbines, you would have had difficulty seeing the Bettws Wind Farm on top the Mawr in weather conditions like this.
This should not be described as a mountain road as the Mawr uplands are not a mountain. Given the conditions at the time, however, there is no way to tell where this road is or where it is going. The only clue is the language on the road – SLOW, or in Welsh ARAF.
If last week’s photo series was about changeable weather, this week’s is about the apparent permanence of moisture during one of the rainy seasons in Wales – there is certainly more than one!
I was recently up on the hills of the Mawr ward near Swansea to assess the conditions for a scheduled project production day . . . what a joke. I couldn’t believe the weather on my journey up there but thought “the weather is so changeable these days, you never know, it might clear“. Ha! Wishful thinking indeed.
Having said that, I had my waterproofs with me and decided it would be good to try and capture something of the atmosphere of the place in these wild conditions. So here is a short accurately descriptive sound clip to accompany the first two images of the week.
I photographed these old fence posts towards the end of my production walk on Rhossili Down. I don’t know what their history is with regard to the pattern of holes but the second image shows an old WWII radar station facing out to sea at the end of the Gower Peninsula.
Also included in todays post is the collection of images from this past week along with a few that were not included in the individual posts – I hope you enjoy 🙂
Rhossili, Rhossili Bay, Rhossili Downs, the cliffs, the beach – all are popular places throughout the year at the end of the Gower Peninsula. It’s not difficult to see why and fortunately the large expanse of the bay and the hills above mean that it rarely feels overcrowded.
