astro

What's the stupidest thing you have ever done for a photo?

This was a question I saw posted on a photography forum I frequent a few weeks ago. I thought about it at the time and realised I’ve done quite a few stupid things to try and get a photo I wanted. Then the more I thought about it, the more I realised that most the photos I have written about, or want to write about, for my Behind the Camera posts seem to have a story behind them that encapsulate my responses to that question quite nicely. Maybe I should be renaming this series to “That time I did a stupid thing to take a photo”.

A few years ago my parents packed up and moved from the town I had called home for twenty years to a small rural village. I’ve been wanting to explore the local area more but with only infrequent and short visits back, now that I have “flown the nest”, it has proven difficult to ever really get the time. One particular location I wanted to visit was this large reflective object at the peak of a hill off in the distance that I always noticed during my drive to and from home. Suspecting it may prove ideal for some night photography, I finally took some time out during this Christmas break to go on a proper scout.

The location itself is pretty stunning. It’s the highest peak in the area providing unobstructed views of the surrounding countryside and towns and features an old abandoned quarry forming an impressive cliff face along one side, an old radar station, which I now believe to be used by the met office, and some skeletons of old buildings dotted around presumably part of the old quarrying operations. There’s a lot of remnants of prior activity around the area and signage warning about restricted areas but after parking as high up the hill as the access road would allow, I continued on foot very much alone. There’s no clear route around the area but I spent my time walking the perimeter of the summit and getting up close to the old station. Having some previous experiences of how night shoots can turn out I made sure to pay careful attention to directions, rough distances and visual markers I could use to navigate with limited light. After satisfying myself with some golden hour shooting I made my way home with the aim of heading back out when the cloud cleared later that night (according to the weather updates on my phone).

I ended up heading out around 10pm that night and thought about turning back many times as I made my way down narrow country roads thick with heavy fog but the promise of a clear sky and the stars I could still make out through the fog as I drove kept me moving forward. Upon reaching the site I grew a little cautious  at the site of the interior lights of another vehicle parked further up and along the hill but could not see any movement. I’m not one to be scared of the dark nor do I believe in the supernatural but what I do know is that out on some hillside with a load of expensive equipment, on my own and so late at night potentially makes me a target and as I made my way along my pre-planned route I couldn’t help but routinely look behind me. Reaching the spot I had scouted for a cliff shot I set up my gear and began shooting taking my time to make sure I got my settings right and shooting between the intermittent fog due to the heavy wind. Satisfied with the results of this location I moved further up the hill to compose a close up of the radar station. I must have only been shooting for a few minutes before I realised I could no longer see the station right in front of me and had been plunged in to further darkness as the towns in the distance were occluded by the fog. It was one of those moments where I felt genuinely, extremely vulnerable. Here I was all alone, with no phone signal, on a freezing hill top and, despite my relatively good selection of torches on hand, without a light source that could penetrate more than a few feet in to the fog around me and  to top it off, a nice quarry cliff face near to my exit route I could no longer find. There’s not much more to say than that, it was kind of stupid, it was pretty scary and I figured I was either going to walk off a cliff or have some unfriendly individualy reveal themself in the fog around me; I probably should find a friend willing to accompany me on stupid trips like this and I’m fortunate that I had the foresight to scout the location out in daylight and make careful notes of terrain so that I could find my way back, maybe next time I’ll take some compass bearings too. Needless to say I was pretty damn relieved when I did make it back to my car and was able to relax and warm up.

But what about that mysterious car light I saw when I arrived? Well during my descent, that car was joined by another car; I’ll never know for certain what was really going on there but I have my theories and based on my previous experiences of astrophotography in remote car-parks that proved to be very popular and active late in to the night (and even had their own coffee van) I think we can all take an educated guess as to what the people in those cars were doing.