Where do you go to take photos?

The bloke and I were chatting about opportunities for taking photos this weekend. It’s (still) sunny and very hot, and he had a couple of suggestions for me. The first was a jousting festival – with costumes, colour and activity it has all the obvious photo potential. The second was not so obvious – evening lawnmower racing. We’ve previously been to a ploughing event – some horses, but mostly tractors, where I got lots of practice but no photos worth bragging about. Maybe lawnmower’s headlights in the darkening summer sky will offer something new as I’m always open to the possibility where photography is concerned.

Here’s a few results from previous outings. First up are the poppies at Fort Nelson in Portsmouth.

Fort Nelson – a “Palmeston” fort and one of five defensive forts built in the 1860s overlooking the naval base of Portsmouth – hosted the art installation “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” earlier this year. Comissioned to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I , it’s estimated that 5 million people visited the piece at it’s original location in the moat of the Tower of London in 2014. There are 888,246 ceramic red poppies, one for each British or Colonial serviceman killed during WWI. Many thanks go to Sarah (cocobella) for this recommendation.

Next here’s the result of a couple of hours wandering the grounds of our local university – Surrey – in Guildford. A very modern campus university with lovely grounds where the modern sculpture sits comfortably in the landscape.

Despite the modernity of the buildings, I remember the grounds with fondness from when I worked there eons ago. The bloke spotted the sculpture of the wolves during a working day visit and decided it could be worth returning with a camera.

And finally, steam trains – another place Himself had visited during the working day and itched to have a camera handy.

We visited Ropley, on the Watercress Line, which gave me the opportunity of playing with black & white and tobacco filters.

Where do you go to take photos? Any and all recommendations would be most welcome. Even those that are not local or in the UK could inspire me to go looking for the equivalent here.

© Debra Carey, 2018