Ashridge Estate 08/03/14

08/03/14

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ashridge-estate/

As I couldn't get into Knebworth or Hatfield house, and because Hertford Castle wasn't very successful, I decided to look for other estate houses with grounds where I could document the landscape gardening. During my research I found Ashridge Estate.

Much like Knebworth house this estate is acres of landscape altered and maintained by people.

Again I chose a estate house because of the maintained landscape gardens and the grounds which may look like natural woodland but is maintained with deforestation to control the trees.

The contact sheet from this shoot can be seen below. 

The first shots of this shoot are of the woodland, I quickly realised this wasn't what I was after and so had to head for the house and its gardens. Unfortunately the house and woodland weren't close and so it took time to get the house by foot, so by the time I got there I didn't have much time left to shoot.

As shown in the contact sheets I went for compositions were the gardens could be seen but with leading lines into house. I felt the gardens were too bare, so I didn't shoot much here. This would be the same pretty much every where because of the time of year. I think the compositions worked well, and the photos would have been successful if taken in the spring or summer, when there was leaves on the trees and flowers growing, because as it was the flowerbeds were just full of stalks of flowers and not a lot else, there was no colour going on, and nothing exciting happening in the images. 

Jaimie Golby

In the image above I think it's quite obvious that it would benefit from having some flowers in the frame to make it more interesting. The composition works, but its just to bare and boring. The time of the year is all wrong for hots like these, ones that depend on the foliage to make the image interesting and to bring it to life.

Jaimie Golby

This above image is more interesting as it gets closer to the subject. But once again it suffers from the same as first, its too bare and boring and is lacking elements and colour within the image. 

Jaimie Golby

I really like the composition of this image, I think it works really well, and has a great sky in as well. The image just doesn't work for the series though. Perhaps it would benefit from being a quicker exposure, the long exposure used created the interesting sky, but sacrificed sharpness, the blur of motion can be seen in the trees, I feel its a bit too much, perhaps it would work in another image set. It also looks like composition could be improved by shooting from a higher perspective, and maybe using a wider angle lens to get more within the frame.