A Solid Perspective on the Past

This really is a challenge. Photos demonstrating 3D. Showing the heft, the mass, the solidity of the main subject: putting it in the perspective of its surroundings.

I took myself to Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. Here is an ancient Cistercian foundation, in ruins since the days when Henry VIII called for the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Here are Georgian water gardens, developed by John and William Aislabie in the 18th century. And here I found my subjects.

Glance through this arch to see where the monks came, eight times a day, for worship.
Huby’s Tower can be glimpsed through the mighty weathered arches of the now roofless Abbey church.

Much of what you find in the gardens is more playful. This balustrade overlooking the lake, shows icicles. ‘It’s summer now’, is the message. ‘Enjoy yourselves. Winter will be along soon enough.’

This young pheasant has found the Banqueting House. Outside is a lawn cut into the shape of a coffin. The message is similar. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’*

And later, explore the woodlands of the High Ride and its ancient trees. Their roots are pretty solid.

2020 Photo Challenge #30

Square Perspectives

* from the Books of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in the Bible.

A Train Ride in London Docklands

Canary Wharf, Crossharbour, Cutty Sark, Mudchute, Pudding Mill Lane, Royal Victoria, West India Quay, Woolwich Arsenal.

Is it any wonder I love travelling on the Docklands Light Railway in London when I visit, with all those evocatively named stations, speaking among other things of London’s past as a thriving port?  A port complicit in many things we’d rather forget, such as the slave trade, but can investigate at the Museum of London Docklands.

The journey is a window onto a watery world of harbours, jetties, watery cul-de-sacs and wharfs: old and new in close juxtaposition.  And the windows of the train carriage itself reflects the cosmopolitan society that London has always been.

Monday Window

Square Perspectives

 

Building a Cathedral in 144 Years

One of Europe’s emblematic skylines is provided by Antoni Gaudí‘s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.  Its construction began in 1882.  It’s due to be completed in 2026.  The cranes which are a constant feature of the skyline will at last become a thing of the past.

 

Square Perspectives

A Cathedral Seen From a Shed

For just a few weeks in 2017, a garden shed appeared in the grounds of Ripon Cathedral.  Only it wasn’t a garden shed.  It was a camera obscura: a rather large pinhole camera.

Here was a wooden shed with a rotating angled mirror at the apex of the roof, projecting an image of the cathedral onto a horizontal surface inside.

Go inside, get used to the dark … and this is what you saw.  A new perspective on an ancient cathedral.

Square Perspectives

Empty Space? Or Part of the Story?

This week, Jude’s Photo Challenge invites us to use empty – negative – space as part of a photo.

I thought that Becky’s Perspective Squares Challenge provided a perfect tool to consider the value of this space.  Is it empty  – as in vacant?  Or does it tell us more about what’s going on?

So I’m going to show you each shot twice.  Once with the negative space I originally included, and then again, cropped to a square illustrating only the subject.  Which do you prefer, in each case?

This is a whistlestop tour to the bird reserve at Slimbridge, to the Farne Islands,  and for the last two sets of shots, to Dallowgill, a lonely, beautiful moor in Nidderdale, only a few miles from home. Click on the images to bring them up full size

Godwit at Slimbridge.
Arctic Tern at the Farne Islands.
Sheep at Dallowgill, Nidderdale.

 

Dallowgill, Nidderdale.

 

2020 Photo Challenge #29

Square Perspectives

 

A Nice Day Out .. or Six Months Inside

Ah, how idyllic … Bolton Castle in Wensleydale.  Perfect for a summer’s day out.

Not if you were Mary Queen of Scots though. She spent six months imprisoned here in 1568.  Although even that incarceration was relative.  She was attended by 30 of her household, which included  knights, servants, ladies-in-waiting, cooks, grooms, a hairdresser, an embroiderer, an apothecary, a physician and a surgeon.  The remaining 20 or so lodged in the nearby village of Castle Bolton.  She went hunting.  She had her hair done.  She learnt English, since up to this point she could speak only Scots, French and Latin.

Imprisonment.  It’s all relative.

Square Perspectives