A Grand Day Out to Stowe Gardens

2021 has been a very lean time for photography: partly because of the Covid lockdown, but mainly because I've spent almost every waking hour since Christmas working on the Cambridge Camera Club website.  Lockdown has been partially lifted and the website is all but complete, so a week ago we went on a Grand Day Out to Stowe Gardens to meet up with the Bristol side of the family.  We last saw Joe in September, and he's grown up a huge amount in six months.  We were only with him for the day, unfortunately, but it won't be long before he's allowed to visit Harston with Frances and Christopher.

Stowe Gardens 2 (Colour)

The second set of pictures from Stowe Gardens in July are in colour, although the very harsh lighting conditions in the middle of the day were not particularly conducive to colour photography.  To "help" us, Jonathan - the organiser - came up with a set of nine topics we might like to tackle:

1. Parallel
2. Out of Focus
3. Detail
4. Water and Sky
5. Taken Inside
6. A Colour Image which doesn't contain the colour Green 
7. Circular
8. Creative
9. My Choice

Well, I remembered the subjects some of the time, but mainly just wandered around in the hot sun enjoying the gardens.  I've captioned the images which claim to match the subjects...

 

Water and Sky

Parallel

My Choice  (who'd have thought I would choose dogs?)

Out of Focus

Definitely Not Green

A view of the Outside, though the Inside, taken from Outside

Detail

Circular  (done in Photoshop)

Circular  (done in camera)

Creative  (ish)

Stowe Gardens 1 (Infra Red)

Back in July there was an outing, organised by the RPS East Anglia Region, to Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire.  This isn't the first time I've been to Stowe (see previous visit here), but it was a great excuse for a day out in the sunshine - especially since it was midweek and I no longer needed to go to work.  Magic...

Stowe is a great place for Infra Red photography, and the bright sunshine resulted in high contrast images with lots of "glowing" foliage.

 

It was high summer when I visited Stowe before, so next time I definitely need to choose a different season.  Autumn colours, perhaps?

Stowe Gardens in Infra-Red

On the way to an RPS meeting in Bath earlier in the month, I decided to take a day off work and visit Stowe Gardens near Buckingham.  Given the weather (intermittent sunshine and fluffy white clouds) I decided to leave the colour camera in the car and shoot entirely in Infra Red.  It was half term, so there were lots of families walking around and having picnics in the grounds.  Despite the number of people there, however, the gardens didn't feel in the slightest bit crowded.  A lovely place, and I'm sure I'll visit again while en route to either Bath or Bristol.  Any excuse for a day off work...

All pictures taken on an IR-converted Fuji X-E2 with 23/1.4 and 50-140/2.8 lenses, processed in Lightroom.