Hertford Castle and Welwyn Viaduct 21/02/14

21/02/14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertford_Castle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digswell_Viaduct

Hertford Castle

For the transition between small impacts on the environment, paths, fences, etc, to the larger scale impacts of cities, large scale buildings, I wanted a stage between. For this I chose state houses and their grounds, as they usually feature landscape gardening. I thought this would be a good subject for my project as its deceptive natural beauty as it appears to be 'natural' but its actually shaped, designed and maintained by people.

Originally I wanted to go to Knebworth and Hatfield house but the grounds are closed to the public during the duration of this project. Instead I have chosen Hertford Castle as a possible location.

To get the minimalistic style I will be making use of a ten stop filter to use long exposure and try and give the images a more artistic feel about them, as my last image sets have been lacking in the artistic side, perhaps due to compositions.

Welwyn Viaduct

The road to Hertford Castle passes under Welwyn Viaduct so I thought I'd take the opportunity while I get it and shoot the viaduct as well.

Using large architectural structures seems to be a obvious choice for a subject in my series of images thats trying to show beauty in made made things within a landscape environment, and Welwyn Viaduct seems like a ideal subject to use. Even better that it happens to be located on a direct route to another of my subjects.

The contact sheet for these shoots can be seen below.

I got to Hertford Castle and immediately was disappointed. The 'grounds' was just a mowed lawn and gravel driveway, and the castle itself seemed to be just an overly sized house. There was nothing there worth photographing that would work in my project, but I took a couple of shots of the entrance featuring as much of the gardens as possible. I couldn't get any leading lines to work in my composition so used long exposure to get the fine art aesthetic but the subject was lacking. 

Jaimie Golby

On my way back home from the castle, I stopped at the viaduct. Being the time of the year it is the trees were all bare and not looking great so I wanted to try and exclude them as much as possible from the shot. This meant walking up and down until I found a spot where I could photograph the building between the trees and only have them bordering the edges of the images.

Unfortunately the side of the viaduct I happened to have access to was the side completely in shade, with the sun setting on the other side, everything was backlit and so resulted in a shady shot of the viaduct loosing out on highlights and details to make it that little bit more interesting.

Again I chose to use long exposure for this location, resulting in quite dramatic images. Perhaps a little too different from the calmer images in the series, but they may work depending on future images. 

Jaimie Golby