Brogborough Windy Tuesday

                    My car was collected to get a service, but there was sunshine and quite a strong wind blowing, so I packed my camera and three lenses, and took the camera bag to the lock-up and my bike; I had hoped that I could put the camera bag in the front basket, but sadly it was not possible, so instead I put the individual items in separately, in so doing did not add any extra compact flash cards as I was not expecting to have large numbers of likely images; it was after all a Tuesday afternoon. 

                    I returned the camera bag to the house, donned my helmet and folded my trousers into my socks and set off for Brogborough Lake, and the fact that I have had a cough and cold for a week now meant that I found myself noticeably weaker on the pedals and I was heading into the wind. Assuming that the wind was unlikely to shift through 180 degrees that at least was a crumb of comfort for the return trip.

                    On arrival, I found the gates were open, but there were not too many vehicles, however there were several sailors out on the lake and the wind was definitely of a reasonable strength, but the overall number of visitors was not large, so I was not reckoning on there being much photos ahead, but I got out my camera and headed towards the water’s edge, and having taken just a few shots on my general purpose 24-70mm, swapped it for the 100-400mm, and soon found some more enticing subjects for the longer lens. Having no support, not even a monopod, I soon drew up a wrought iron chair and sat down to shoot which was less of a strain, as the wind was strong enough to be noticeable when holding the camera to my eye for any length of time.

                    I was also having to take more shots due to the amount of wind that was affecting my framing, and this was where my failure to bring a spare CF card was going to limit  the time I was going to spend shooting. That lack of foresight really made me feel very annoyed with myself! The card had 32GB which in my pessimism had seemed more than adequate, but I had made no allowance for my taking more shots due to the wind, or that the weather might be conducive to my taking a greater number of images. That was poor professionalism and it really irked that I should make such an inexcusable mistake.

                    I soon packed everything back onto my bike and headed back with a following and very welcome wind behind me, and once back settled into levelling horizons, lightening deep shadows and holding highlights when I had been shooting towards the sun, it was certainly noticeable that shooting handheld did make for more out of kilter horizons compared to shooting from a tripod.

                    Altogether, a satisfactory afternoon’s shooting, with albeit more images left on the metaphoric cutting room floor!