Here’s another perspective from the church yard of St. Mary’s church, Kirkby Lonsdale. This is the church that was used for the exterior shots in the recent BBC TV series: Jamaica Inn. I loved how the entire surrounding area still looks old – apart from the TV aerials on the houses there’s a wonderful period feel to the area.
At the weekend we took a trip up to Ingleton Falls, followed by a stop off at Kirkby Lonsdale for a bite to eat and to take a few photos of Ruskin’s View (more of that in a later post), but one of the areas I’d noticed on my first brief visit to this beautiful town was the church and surrounding graveyard and houses. I mentioned to several people that it would look great in a period drama – lot’s of authentically old buildings and not much modern stuff to get in the way. What a surprise then to find that the town was used for the filming of the BBC series Jamaica Inn! So, here’s the church that you see in the series, although I believe that the internal shots are of somewhere else…
It’s sometimes possible when editing photos on a computer to look too much at the histogram and not at the actual image. We can focus on highlights and blacks, and on getting a good spread of tones, which is all rather academic. What you really need to do is concentrate on the final image and how you see it. I loved the soft tones of the RAW image for this shot and decided to try and enhance the gentle tones and light…
It is rather disappointing that Southport Pier is closed at 5:30 this time of year. There’s still plenty of light left, and what could be better than watching the sun go down from the vantage point of the second longest pier in Britain? But as I was grabbing this last minute shot every visitor was being herded towards the exit by a not very happy council employee. As I waited for this ‘gentleman’ to pass out of shot he threatened to lock me in if I didn’t move. Is it any wonder that Southport is seeing less and less visitors to the town. We should be making the most of this wonderful Victorian heritage, encouraging people to make to most of it. It’s got lights (not that they are switched on), so why not use them and keep visitors coming until they are ready to go. Perhaps keeping the pier open until after sunset and a few hot food stalls at the beach end of the pier to warm up later visitors would help to make this an attraction once again, rather than a distasteful experience…
Seen at Ainsdale Beach, near Southport. The sun was just setting and the marram grass was blowing in the wind…
En-route to see a client yesterday I took my constitutional 5 minutes to stop at Ainsdale beach. There was total cloud cover and not a lot of light. I noticed a few gulls following the shore line so I went for a longer zoom to capture them flying above the fence line.
It was cold, wet and windy, but the sun was setting, so I grabbed a few shots as the sun sank behind the pier. The wave patterns in the foreground sand add a wonderful foreground interest to this shot.
What do you do when you want to shoot a landscape, but there’s nothing interesting nearby? Use a long zoom, of course! Shot from Ainsdale beach you can see Formby and North Wales in this shot.
Southport and Ainsdale beaches are vast, flat and featureless. As a photographer you have to latch onto any object of interest, even if it is a solitary shell in the middle of that vast, featureless expanse of sand. It’s a good job I like minimal photographs as the Sefton coast lends itself to this sort of shot!
I believe that these paint peeling, faded and jaded Victorian shelters are going to be given a makeover, but I have to confess: I quite like them as they are! Perhaps I should make a record of them now before they get upgraded…