13th July 2013 - Dartmoor

An early start for the long journey from Norwich to Bude. Woke up at two in the morning and realised I'd accidentally fallen asleep. We were supposed to be leaving about half two and I hadn't finished packing stuff-that-wasn't-clothes. Mad rush to make sure I had everything, then time to bundle it all into the car. Fell back asleep fairly quickly, but woke up periodically with cramp from trying to curl up.

We arrived in Dartmoor about half eight and quickly came upon a herd of ponies. We parked up near the caravan in the picture and hopped out. It was incredibly hot despite being so early. I couldn't be bothered to put my shoes on so I wandered around barefoot, getting myself into crazy-photographer-photos trying to keep at the eye level of the animals, many of which had decided to lie down because of the heat. As we left the ponies, I took this out of the window of the car. How lovely would it be to park up at night then wake up in the morning surrounded by wild ponies?

We made our way on to the two bridges, a spot I'd visited eight years ago as a child, and paddled in the stream as I did back then as well. The cool water was lovely relief from the burning sun. I waded out into the middle to try and take a photo of the bridge, but bits were getting in the way of my composition and I ended up not liking any of the photos I took there.

We continued driving around and then went to Widecombe to find some lunch (though at this point I’d lost all concept of time and had no idea it was lunchtime). There was a mare and her foal wandering free on the green and loads of foreign (I think French) students in groups sat on the grass.

When we’d finished our lunch and had a little look around it was time to head towards the cottage we were going to be staying in for the next week. We made one more stop on the way to watch and photograph the Dartmoor ponies, then made our way towards Bude.

29th June 2013 - Dawn's Wedding

Today I attended the wedding of Dawn and Kevin. Here is a selection of photos I took for them.

One hundred days of summer - day twenty nine.

17th June 2013 - Upton Dyke

Today was my first full day back at home. Jason was still here so we decided to go for a walk to take photos.

We started our walk on the marshes where we decided to walk to the dyke rather than all the way to the riverside. All the cows in the field decided they wanted to come and say hello but soon got bored of watching us and went back to grazing.

We found the path that leads to the dyke and followed it through marshes and a field of horses.

When we neared the dyke we stopped to take photos of the windmill.

I took a few photos, but couldn't find much inspiration.

Jason wanted to take some long exposure shots across the water, so I left him to it and had a wander around, slightly further up river. There was a boat that I liked the look of but I couldn't get the composition right as things were in my way, so I let the shot go.

On our way back to my house we walked past this house - it's so pretty!

Day Seventeen

I Promise To Catch Up Soon

Since I've been home from uni I've been a bit rubbish at keeping up with this blog... I've promised several times on Flickr that there would be blog posts to accompany some of my Summer One Hundred photos but I've still not got round to actually writing them...

I'm hoping all the photos I've taken will help trigger memories of details of the days I choose to blog about. It's been way too long for me to blog each day, but I'll try and write something up for the interesting ones.

One day I'll get good a keeping up with a blog...

16th June 2013 - Dovedale

We got up early to finish packing. My dad had offered the yesterday night to take me and Jason to the peaks if we (I) was packed and ready early enough. We misjudged how long it was going to take to get everything done and we were in a bit of a rush, but we managed to get everything done by half eleven when we set off for Dovedale.


We found a nice rock to sit on and eat lunch when we arrived, and Jason and I spent some time taking photos. It was pretty busy since it was a) the weekend and b) a nice day. We had ideas for photos, but there were too many kids running around for some of them to be feasible. Nevertheless, Jason decided to give it a go anyway. When he's uploaded some photos I'll link them. I didn't bother to try some things as I didn't have the patience to wait for people to get out of the way.

I attempted to use the Brenizer method a couple more times, this time using my 55-250mm to see how it would turn out.

The second one I tried has too many photos and kept crashing. I'm going to try doing it in smaller batches but I haven't sorted the photos into these smaller batches yet.

After a while we had to head back in order to make it home at a reasonable time. On the walk back to the car, we passed a man (fly?) fishing in the river/stream and I stopped to take a photograph. He saw me and gave me a big grin but I used autofocus and the camera decided the people behind him were more important so it's all out of focus... my own fault really, even though I selected the focus point right on top of him. Stupid camera. Oh well!

We took a couple more photos just before we reached the car park and then headed off.

Messed about a little bit with my camera on the journey home and looked through Jason's shots.

We made it back in good time. I showed off my huge tv (the only reason I didn't get a train home for summer) and we watched tv for a while.