Romsey Abbey...

Thursday 28th August

Late evening I took my Nikon - the older of the two sisters - out on an Anniversary date (some of you will know what I am referring to) and for some reason, (quite local, not that expensive, late trains coming back, perhaps) it was the train to Romsey.

Romsey Abbey is a large, chunky and quite formidable (I didn't say ugly!) chunk of church. That previous Blip was at around sunrise, I'd do some of it floodlit, I thought.

Good in LARGE

Taking the tripod, I found myself slightly lost and missing the sunset, I was looking for a footpath I'd been on before that went by the River Test and a couple of old mills. They'd look nice at dusk! Well, no. They have, like so many, been converted to residential use and so had cars parked outside and with so much growth around the river, I just couldn't get a good view.

I blindly and I suppose instinctively veered off up hill on a new footpath. From this viewpoint, here, I got a reasonably clear view of the Abbey and was well in time for its floodlighting to come on.

I waited and I waited. The town's lights around it got brighter, whilst the Abbey just got darker. In the end I felt quite miffed that they chose not to switch those lights on, on a Thursday. An email to the relevant authorities was in order!!

Using the Tamron SP 70-300mm VC with a 30 second exposure and a nice small aperture, I have though captured some really nice details. Enough residual light in the sky and the Abbey still picking up light from the twilight sky. Only a few minutes later, it was plunged into near darkness.

It was an interesting sky too - unbeknown to me I could see the flightpath to and from Southampton airport. I did take a few zoomed out shots to include a few of these 'alien' goings on but they were so high up, the shots had to be pretty wide.

Quite a lot of processing to eek out detail in even the darkest shadows. I'm pleased with the results. One could make it a project to photograph every Abbey, Minster and Cathedral in this way, at this time of day. The project is now "Live"!

You'll find in the next Blip, taken at midnight, just what had happened to those floodlights as I go down to investigate...