Thursday, December 11, 2008

By the light ... of the silvery moon

Walked: 10 December 2008
Distance: 7.5m

I've been wanting to go out walking at night for some time. It's happened by accident a couple of times, and I've enjoyed it. Tonight was reasonably clear and the moon was very nearly full.

I discovered that my old camera isn't up to taking good night-time photos. To the eye, there was plenty of light to see by, but all of my photos have just come out as black squares.

This is the only one that is usable. The moon doesn't look half as beautiful here as it did at the time.



It was very rewarding. The moon looked beautiful, the towns and cities were clusters of orange lights, and the moonlight was bright enough to walk by. The light was amazing. My disastrous photography proved that it wasn't really as bright as it appeared to the eye. A strange monochrome though, that colour being mithril.

I'm not sure whether it was a bad idea to walk paths that I didn't know very well, or a great idea. Orienteering was a little more of a challenge than in daylight. This being a linear walk, I obviously walked the same route back, but in reverse. I didn't need the map on the return part of the walk, because I remembered the paths pretty well. I think this was because when I did have the map out, I had to try and memorise as much as I could, because after reading a map by bright torchlight, it was very difficult to see in the moonlight once more.

I picked up where I left off last time out - starting in Stanton and walking east to Castle Donington, trying to keep to the higher ground for the views over the Trent valley.




The route above was generated using Meander.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Map image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

4 comments:

Carl said...

Did you try perching the camera on a wall or gatepost and utilising the timer? I've had a couple of reasonable (though not great) results doing this.

dive said...

Yay for mithril, Pea.
I suppose with the lack of daylight hours to go walking it was inevitable that you'd join the vamps and werefolk.

Take Carl's advice (or a tripod) next time so you can share the pretties with us.

peahen said...

Thanks both. I'll try using the timer and slow shutter. As for vamps and werefolk, Dive, I'm sorry to say I didn't meet any. What did spook me, and made me turn back, was graffiti on a concrete wall around the racing circuit. There's something very very primitive going on there, on their part for feeling the need to make it and mine for feeling uncomfortable when I saw it.

dive said...

Now my curiousity is truly piqued, Pea.