Blog, Huntingdon
Houghton, Hartford and Godmanchester
Jan
Photo Digital Artwork
All too often I think to myself that I need to travel hundreds of miles to take photographs of mountains, fast running water cascades and waterfalls. However, if I adjust my thinking and look closer to home I can find some amazing images that I can use for creating my artwork.
Great Ouse – Hartford
Last weekend, the 18th and 19th of Jan ’20, I went wandering with the camera (and the wife), we stayed very close to home, now more than 3 miles away, and the aim was to have a short walk to blow the cobwebs away. Well, as soon as I picked up my camera, with an 18-135mm F4.5 canon lens and a spare battery, the wife just said, “oh I guess I best make a flask of coffee and bring some snacks as well then!”. She knows me very well as once I start “snapping” a simple short walk can last for hours……
Anyway to cut a long story short, hurray I hear you say, we wandered down to the Great Ouse and navigated our way around the flooded river bank paths stopping to “snap” shots of the recent floods and the leaves coated with a fine frost.
Although the weather was amazing the light was a bit harsh for my normal style of photograph, so I started to think a little differently looking for reflections, shadows and contrasting colours, which is more in the style of my abstract art rather than my painterly landscapes. Although this exercise kind of worked, the images were sort of, well, not me, not what floats my boat, see an example below:
Anyway, despite my failed attempts to take something that I thought could be usable and fit in with my style of artwork we plodded on towards Godmanchester.
Godmanchester
Unfortunately, due to the flooding we had to cut our walk short, if we had wellies rather than walking boots on, perhaps we could have ventured a little further, but hey never mind, lets sit on that bench and have a coffee and gobble some of the snacks.
So coffee in hand and snacks being munched I sat and watched the muddy water of the Great Ouse charging around the island that is Watermeadows and rushing through the sluice gates. It was then that I had my eureka moment and wished that I had my ND filter and tripod. The sky was clear not a single cloud in the sky and the sun was causing soft but relatively noticeable reflections of the buildings over the river. I had a clear picture in my head of what I wanted to create and knew that as long as I captured the image I could make something a little special, something that combined my love of soft painterly landscapes with the harsh clash of colours that I use in my artwork. Here is the base photo, again on its own nothing special, just a quick snap shot of what was in front of me whilst drinking a coffee:
Portholme Meadow
Happy that I now had at least one base photograph to create some local art from we headed back to Huntingdon past the Bridge Hotel and down Mill Common to take a look at Portholme Common (which we would normally have walked over from Godmanchester) to see how far the flood waters reached. Well, the whole meadow was covered, even the gardens of the new(ish) houses of Waters Meet were flooded, so on reflection even if we had wellies there is no way we would have been able to walk across the meadow.
Standing for a few minutes watching some dogs splash in the water my eyes were drawn to some long boats moored up at Hutningdon Boathaven. Two of three quick snaps and another potential piece of artwork was in the bag.
The artwork
Back at home I was itching to get the images out of my camera and into photoshop. After some basic camera raw adjustments, and a crop to correct the horizon level I was off, adding oblong blocks of colour, directional blur, brush strokes, and many adjustment layers I finally came up with a look that “felt right”. I eventually ended up with around 30 layers to finish the artwork and added one stock image of silhouetted birds to the final piece.
So the lesson I learn last weekend was look around you, you don’t need to be in Cumbria to take photos and create great art, there is so much opportunity on your doorstep. Anyway the artwork is shown below along with another from a walk we had to Houghton Mill, take a look, let me know what you think and pop over to my web shop to check the super pieces on these unique prices of artwork, they would look great hung on your wall!
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