Staring At The Sun

It's been a while since my last post (over a week!) so I thought I'd put up some of my photos from Essex. These are all taken in the fields around Wix from a couple of evening walks. 

The best thing about going for walks down in these southern lands, is that you can walk randomly off across the fields and never get stuck as a result of crumbling dry stone walls, rivers or cliffs - the worst you ever have to struggle past is a slight ditch between fields... easy.

This first one was taken a couple of nights back, we had been driving back from a KFC at Clacton and there was the most amazing mist hovering over the fields - again, not something I'm all that used to in the hilly lands of the north. So once back, I rushed around collecting all my camera stuff and headed on out to see if I could catch the last of the sun. Unfortunately I was a bit late, but managed to at least see some of the last rays heading up into the sky...

The next set of pictures are all from my better planned and prepared evening walk on April Fools Day. We set off out at about half 6 to navigate our way through the nearby fields - I had already noticed from the car a few trees that looked nice, along with a crumbling barn further away - so we headed out to explore these in the hope of finding something suitable as the sun was setting. 

I think the first photo from this walk (above) is probably my favourite. It has everything I was wanting - from the rich sunset colours reflecting off the green grass to the silhouetted tree and some good lines leading into the picture.

The next one, below, is a close second. Again I like the rich colours, the texture of the soil with nice lead-in lines and golden glow and of course - the tree. In many ways the same as the first picture. Always nice to break some 'rules' too with the symmetry in this shot...

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A few more minutes spent walking backwards and forwards looking for different angles of this tree lead to this final picture before we quickly had to run off to reach the barn before the sun completely disappeared...

As usual, there were plenty of distractions along the way - the gravel track particularly intrigued me - so here is one I threw in which is a bit different. Not sure how I feel about it yet, but what do any of you think?...

So... onto the barn. Still racing against the sun (I'm sure it sets much faster when you have no time than it does when nobody is watching...) we made it to the barn where I hurriedly explored the angles and perspective again - whilst staying quite clear of the heap of manure. Below is the result of all this hard work. The sky was largely clear, so a more distant perspective with less angular sky included made it easier to fill the frame with the lower sunset colours... I quite like what I ended up with.

After a bit more standing around, waiting to see just what the last rays of sunlight would do, we headed off before it got too dark to see and avoid any of the ditches I am so good at not falling into. 

Hope you all like this week's work (if I can call it that)...