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pfm Picture A Week (PAW) 2019 part I

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Happy new year lads, been a while since I visited. Here's a snap I made in a hurry against a rapidly setting sun, recently. Next time I'll try a couple of SB700's lighting the flank... my goal for this year is to learn to use adjustment brushes with finesse #8 )

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Nikon D3 + AF Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 with SB900 on SC28 cable. Hosted on flickr.
 
Where has Winter gone? The weather over the Christmas break has been horrendous for landscape photography. Dull, wet and mild. A far cry from the cool, clear and crisp Winter mornings I had been hoping for.

I've been out with the camera a few times but just wasn't 'feeling it'. This is partly down to the aforementioned weather but I also feel it's a hangover from having spent a fabulous weekend in The Lake District towards the end of October. An undesired side-effect of that trip has been that I've been less enthusiastic about my local landscape.

Time to pick myself back up and put in the hours! Here's one from an outing yesterday where I forced myself to work hard and look for compositions.



Entanglement by Amar Sood, on Flickr

Sony A7rII / 70-200mm f4

Lefty

I have hardly used my camera outside since the spring!

This is lovely, softly atmospheric, a great sense of recession.
 
I have hardly used my camera outside since the spring!

I would go mad if forced to abstain from photography for that long! I was starting to feel immensely frustrated after not having taken any serious photos since returning from The Lake District 2 months ago.

This is lovely, softly atmospheric, a great sense of recession.

Thank you so much - I'm really pleased with the way this image has been received. It was one which I personally liked but thought it might be a bit 'niche'. I definitely took a 'loose painterly' approach when processing this image. (Heavily influenced by me picking the paintbrush back up again over Christmas). Someone on Twitter described it as a 'Symphony of Browns' which I might have to use as the title of the image going forward :D

Lefty
 
Not sure how this will work on the forum. More for interest than artistic quality, it's a 3 shot panorama taken last winter from the village of Beaumont Hamel looking across the 1916 German lines towards the infamous sunken lane (the trees in the background) which featured in the recently colourised film 'They Shall Not Grow Old' by Peter Jackson. The courses of the German 2nd and reserve trenches can clearly be seen in the ploughed field - the fire trench was just over the lip of the slope - and the meadow to the left, which has never been ploughed is still pockmarked by shell craters. The trenches can still be clearly followed in the wood, and I believe that the old German positions there are to be opened to public access.

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Not sure how this will work on the forum. More for interest than artistic quality, it's a 3 shot panorama taken last winter from the village of Beaumont Hamel looking across the 1916 German lines towards the infamous sunken lane (the trees in the background) which featured in the recently colourised film 'They Shall Not Grow Old' by Peter Jackson. The path of the German 2nd and reserve trenches can clearly be seen in the ploughed field - the fire trench was just over the lip of the slope - and the meadow to the left, which has never been ploughed is still pockmarked by shell craters. The trenches can still be clearly followed in the wood, and I believe that the old German positions there are to be op

Takes me back. Is this taken looking towards the Newfoundland Memorial, with Hawthorn Ridge to the right?
 
No, this is with my back facing the higher, north sector of Beaumont-Hamel village (I'm standing on what was a German backstop machine-gun position and strongpoint) looking across the German lines towards the British lines. The gound falls away to the left and the lane into the village from Auchonvillers, then quite steeply rises again onto the Hawthorn Ridge. The Hawthorn mine is about 300 yards to my left-front, and the Newfoundland Memorial Park is away to my left-rear, about half a mile away.

These trenches were held by the Germans continuously from 1915 until November 13th 1916, when they finally fell to the Highland Division, whose memorial is at the foot of the sunken lane, just beyond the wood. That attack involved a second blowing of the Hawthorn mine, leaving a vast double crater which is currently being cleared of undergrowth and restored to visitors. The July 1st attack had been a total failure here. After the village had fallen the lines only moved a short distance, and Wilfred Owen's battalion was fighting in exposed positions on the Redan Ridge some 400 yards to my rear in January 1917. It was so bitterly cold that several men died of exposure. In February the Germans fell back some 30 miles to the newly-prepared Hindenberg line, and Owen's battalion was engaging them on the outskirts of St.Quentin, but by March 1918 the Germans were back in these same trenches, which they occupied for another 6 months. Owen, who was then in England, wrote to his mother that 'they are dying again in Beaumont-Hamel, where the streets were already cobbled with the skulls of our people in 1916'.
 
Again, no artistic merit, but for context and interest. This is taken from directly in front of the panorama, between the German & British lines and looking to the left/south across the front of the wood, the valley in which the Auchonvillers road is just visible, then onto the Hawthorn Ridge and the tree-covered crater, which was blown beneath a German redoubt just forward of the main trenches, which run over the ridge just through the left hand side of the crater. The Cross of Sacrifice in the Beaumont Hamel British Military Cemetery can just be seen between the two trees to the front right, and the two rounded trees behind the crater locate the position of Hawthorn Ridge No.1 Cemetery. The trees in the distance beyond are on the edge of the Newfoundland Memorial Park.

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No, this is with my back facing the higher, north sector of Beaumont-Hamel village (I'm standing on what was a German backstop machine-gun position and strongpoint) looking across the German lines towards the British lines.

Understood, thanks, think my memory is playing up!
 
And you seem to have either found a colour mode or some colour film!!!

Ah, yes. My Somme and Owen projects are of course B&W ones, but I found that only rarely were the light conditions suitable for mono - as in these instances, too flat - so I have a susbstantial inventory of sometimes quite acceptable colour photos that are detined not to make it into the main projects. Very frustrating. I have been using B&W film as well as digital, and I think that I will in the future try colour film too, with a view towards the added flexibility when converting using the colour sliders in SilverEfex.
 
Some B&Ws taken the following month, May 2018.

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The Hawthorn Crater, Beaumont Hamel, Somme, Nikon D7200 Nikon 17-55 f2.8


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Beaumont-Hamel British Cemetery & the Hawthorb Crater, Nikon F3, Nikon 28mm f2.8, Kodak T-Max 400

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The Sunken Lane, Beaumont-Hamel, Nikon F3, Nikon 28mm f2.8, Kodak T-Max 400

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The Hawthorn Ridge and crater looning towards Beaumont-Hamel from Geoffrey Malins' position. Malins filmed the iconic sequence of the mine blowing from this spot on 1st July 1916. Nikon D7200, Nikon 17-55 f2.8.
 
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