I look forward to springtime, the land awakening from the long dark days of winter, splashes of colour to brighten up those rainy spring days. Not that there has been many of those this year, with spring being very dry and quite warm. In turn the dryness has perhaps made the flowers not glow quite so much this year. Certainly the woodland ones, where there is more competition for the precious water, fruit blooms did seem to benefit and there were a lot of bee’s around too, which hopefully means a bumper crop of fruit later this year (thinking selfishly about my allotment!)
The lovely display of cherry blossom at Bollin Hall, Bradford.
One of my favourite flowers is the wood anemone, sadly, I didn’t get the chance to see them at their peak this year. Amongst the first to come into bloom, along with the bright celandines, they are amongst the first acts of the springtime show.
Without a doubt, the stars of springtime are the vast carpets of bluebells and ramsons (wild garlic). Every year I try to locate different area’s where these carpets of colour may have a good showing, so I visit a lot of woodlands, some familiar and some new to me. This year I visited a lovely managed woodland near Goldsborough, it’s coppiced for charcoal, so whilst being a lovely woodland to explore, it’s lacking in the character I am searching for. It does however have a good bluebell display and I take a composition of two around the best patch.
Lovely light on the fading bluebells.
Because exploring new woodlands is very time consuming and my time is limited, it’s always useful to know of a few places to fall back onto for reliability. Especially for those times when the perfect conditions are forecast and you don’t want the pressure of searching a new location for compositions when the conditions could change quickly. This year though, there was very little of those perfect conditions. Ideally a light cloud inversion with light from the rising sun, creating that perfect atmosphere for woodland photography,
Backlit woodland near Esholt.
My fall-backs are two woodlands for bluebells, one (which i wont name) is becoming a little more popular and this is showing with the frustrating trampling of flowers from less careful people. The other is springwoods near Esholt, which has a very good display but does lack those characterful tree’s for my ideal shots.
The other woodland I try to call into is the woodland trust managed woods at Skipton Castle. Which has one of the best displays of ramsons that I’m aware of in my local area, though with its steep bank and not being allowed to wander off the footpath (with very good reason, see above) it requires zoom lenses to bring out the compositions.
Using a zoom to compress the scene at Skipton Castle Woods.
Cherry tree and daisies, Bingley.
There is so much happening in springtime, That to concentrate solely on woodland scenes, would be missing out on so much more. The fruit blossom this year looked amazing, probably the best in a few years. I love cherry blossom, its so vibrant and peacocky in nature. The planted avenues creating a vista’s of pink. The only drawback is the compositions can be a little limited, or is that just a lack of imagination, I suspect it is. The local public area has a cherry tree with white blossom, which really stood out in the square. The other wonderful spring display is the daffodil. Every year I think about going to area’s to get the carpets of daffodils and I have once more failed in this self promise, nest year!
Springtime ICM. An in camera double exposure.
Thanks for reading.