Fenland

[Hertz van Rental]

*Edit: after the comments about it being too dark I checked. ImageShack seems to have done something odd to it so I've re-loaded it.

 

[Antarctican]

Love it! Beautiful lighting, and so many interesting 'lines'.

Is this close to where you live?

 

[LaFoto]

THIS is where I originally wanted to go when we decided for a boating holiday in England back in 2000. We ended up on the Norfolk Broads, which was as well, only to find out that actually we had only moved to an area of Germany that looks identical to all East Anglia, flat, wet, with many draining canals to make the land arable or in any way useful for agriculture.

This is why I almost feel like I am "at home" when I look at this photo, only don't we have the sun here. Or I am not up that early, for that matter (for sometimes a day starts out nicely, only to become the usual grey by the time I start to notice ).

Was "leading lines" one of your topics here?

 

[danalec99]

Is it possible to explain what went through your head during the planning/execution stage?

 

[Big Mike]

At first site, it 'feels' too dark...but the more I look, the better it gets. It really holds my eye, I keep moving around it.

 

[Hertz van Rental]

I tend to balance things so they look right on my monitor (which I calibrate regularly). I do them like I would a print so it's always a fine line between too dark on the ground and losing the sky.

"Is it possible to explain what went through your head during the planning/execution stage?"

It's kind of hard to put into words. My personal photography has got to the stage where I am exploring my reactions to things. 'How do I feel about this?'
More accurately I see something that makes me stop and look. Sometimes I know why it is that I'm looking and I keep a lot of little half-formed ideas in my head, a bit like a sketch book. Other times I have to sit and look and think. Now and then a few ideas will come together and crystallise. Then I go looking for what I have in my mind.
The Fens are big and flat. Everything is spread out under a big open sky and you get this strange feeling of being exposed yet insignificant.
Most of the ground features are linear so you have lots of 'lines' to play with.
There is also a lot of water, normally in drainage dykes, which reflect the open sky. As the soil is very dark the ground water gleams like diamonds in the night.
On this day I found a straight road that went for several miles and at regular intervals dykes went off at 90 degrees in similar long, straight lines. I liked the effect.
I kept stopping and getting out the car to look and eventually I found this one.
There were many little elements in there that fascinated me and they all just came together.
The power lines go counter to the dyke and make a kind of 'X' (marks the spot).
The linear dyke terminates with a half-circle in front of the viewer, joining the 'dark' bank to the 'light' bank. The two little V's of freshly ploughed earth to either side. The reed stubble in the water.
There are lots of boundaries there, too, which is strange in such an open landscape.
And the almost precise geometry of the land is at odds with the cloud chaos in the sky.
Everything just fell right.

And I also remember having a conversation with Jocose about shooting a ditch somewhere else. About trying to make a ditch interesting. That was at the back of my mind too.

 

[danalec99]

Splendid. Thanks for sharing.

Glad to see you around!

 

[Antarctican]

I'm trying to figure out from the light and the length of the shadows what time of day this was taken, but can't quite do it. Was it late afternoon? There's a 'warm' colour to the light on the grass, and the shadows seem quite long. But i guess it might look that way in the early morning too.

Just wondering.