Walkers depart White Nancy

Back to one of my favorite local spots, the magnificent vantage point that is the saddle of Kerridge Hill and location of the White Nancy folly. Great light, brilliant sky and a 10mm lens — I’m in heaven — or pretty close to it!

Bollington weir

I keep forgetting the name of the location but it is tucked away on the far side of Kerridge Hill as one heads back down toward Bollington. It also marks the start of a very scenic path that goes all the way over to the Cat and Fiddle inn. The highest pub in Britain.

The view West from White Nancy, Bollington, Cheshire.

I think this was my first visit to Kerridge Hill and White Nancy of 2011. March 13th was the first reasonably pleasant day of the year — shirt sleeve weather — and the cloud was good! I just knew it would be a good day for Nancy. Snapped on my Sigma 10 -20 lens and headed out for Kerridge in anticipation.

New gatework at White Nancy

{ White Nancy, painted with light (LED Torch) and 20 second exposure at 100 ISO f5. Lens: Sigma 10-20mm. }

I have been planning this kind of thing for some time now and last Sunday the conditions were just about right. It was a fairly balmy night with a clear sky and a large and reasonably bright waning moon. I decided to ride up to Kerridge with all of my gear crammed into a back pack — not a very comfortable ride with a tripod and large camera on ones back but I just felt that I had to try my White Nancy light painting experiment. I took some flash shots too but they are much less interesting than these.

The photos were taken with a Nikon D80 which is probably not really the best camera for such long exposures, some have reported that they are very noisy above 1 second of activity due to the current hungry sensor heating up but these shots appear to be better than I had expected though they are not suitable for up-scaling and printing at any appreciable size unfortunately.

I enjoy light painting for a number of reasons, not least being out doors after dark but there is also something very interactive about it, the sense of actually working with the image as the camera is capturing it is very satisfying and creates a feeling of man and machine (camera) working in some new kind of harmony.

This video constitutes something new for me, it is the first (to go online) which actually features a sort of reflexive monologue, it also has a few unique technical features which attempt to off-set the very lofi characteristics of the video from a Sony W50 P and S camera. I have recorded the monologue sound direct to the computer with a high quality system then spent hours re-syncing it with the video, loads of trimming and ‘nudging’ was required. Unfortunately, a couple of shots were lost (ha – accidentally deleted) so there are a few unintentional jumps in the flow. The idea was just to make homage to White Nancy in my own inimitable poetic style. I do like to create something with technology that is less than perfect and where some degree of technical coaxing and invention is required — and this is very definitely an end product of that kind of activity.

New Gallery format I have also updated / reverted my new gallery page to old-fashioned html page displays for the large versions of the photos rather than having them come up in java lightbox effects. It has taken the best part of two years for me to realise that lightbox was preventing my images from getting into the google image search results. Hopefully this new (old) approach will do wonders, it also enables me to write much more in depth descriptions / narratives on my photos which is always a good thing.

Apart from all of the terrible human tragedy, the recent spate of both natural and man made calamities (9/11, Asia, Katrina etc) have illustrated the relative importance of various occupations and skills. When disaster strikes we need Engineers, Emergency workers, Health Workers, and Construction Workers, in other words those people that have the skills to restore vital services, save lives, provide shelter, and boost morale. I think I have spent too much time in useless and effete bourgeois occupations! At the end of the day the “workers” skills are the only ones that matter, the only ones with any validity. Also let us not forget that these terrible events serve to demonstrate the awesome power of nature and are a mere taster of things to come if she is wounded and usurped by our own greedy and selfish demands.

But I digress, again I have been enjoying night time constitutionals on my bike, have to keep those wheels turning, the legs pumping its better than any substance I know! The routine night time trip includes Prestbury to Rainow via Kerridge and back through Macclesfield, the “Kerain” or the “Maccerainer” if going in the opposite direction, a real test of physical capability. The other regular is Prestbury to Bollington, across to Pott Shrigley and then back through Bolli to Pres or the “Bolipot Loop”.

The last couple of nights have been wonderfully mild and yet clear, once out of the lit zone and heading up into the Peaks, I can at last fully savor the wonder of the night sky. It is particularly good at this time of year as those classic northern constellations Cassiopeia and Ursa Major are well aspected throughout the night, but you can also see the milky way when reaching the high point before the descent into Pot Shrig. I just can’t help but stop and look up, and then of course I become transfixed. There is something about this type of landscape that resonates with the cosmos and I don’t know how to define it, a primordial quality, or a certain timelessness perhaps. Last night the sky scape was complimented by a lot of activity in the “approach stack” for Manchester Airport. The sight of aircraft circling high above the White Peak with landing lights projecting ten mile long beams was just surreal, like a scene from Close Encounters. Then an enormous meteor shot across the sky, it appeared to change from a dazzling blue white to a vivid crimson colour and projected shadows on the ground! I have never seen such a display and it was awesome. Unfortunately, the likely culprit could have been metallic “space junk” not very romantic, though maybe the prospect of having seen a piece of the earliest ventures into space burn up is quite romantic. My brother once told me that one is supposed to report sightings of burn ups or “fire balls” of this magnitude because A) they could have resulted in the atmospheric penetration of deadly radioactive “space junk” or top secret “space junk”. B) They could have been incoming Russian ICBMs. And C) meteors of this magnitude could be mere fragments of something much larger on the same course. So, I may have witnessed the prelude to the end of the world last night.