A few days ago I was out for a walk in the glorious countryside near the UNESCO World Heritage site of Avebury in Wiltshire. There are various Bronze Age barrows/burial mounds in the area, (some as old as the Pyramids!), that are almost ignored due to the amazing Avebury stone circle and Silbury Hill nearby. Quite a few of them have clumps of beech trees on them, and they are atmospheric places to visit, especially on a cold and windy late autumn day.
I was carrying my Lumix TZ-100 compact camera, but I didn’t use it once. My main photographic tool these days when out walking is my Huawei Mate 10 Pro mobile phone. It’s so flexible, and the quality is fine for website stuff like this blog. It’s got a relatively wide-angle lens, so it captures quite a lot of information. Here I have looked up, always a good idea, and recorded the fabulous filigree patterns the autumn trees made. Two trees still had leaves which broke the pattern. I’ve cropped it so there is a tree trunk coming from each corner. I like corners!
As well as looking up, looking down can be rewarding. At the centre of this barrow there was a pair of stones, one of which had been broken. it looked for all the world like an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture, but I suspect it was put there by some new-agey folks, or perhaps people who wanted a table for their sandwiches! The arrangement of the rocks mimicked/mirrored the pattern of the trees a few yards away. You can see another beech covered barrow in the distance.
It wouldn’t be a walk near trees without using the Hauwei’s wonderful “Silky Water” mode and moving the camera during the exposure. I chose a pair of tree trunks to be in the centre and moved the camera up during the exposure. To me it really captures the atmosphere of the barrow beech clump; are there dryads?
by Derek Gale