I Spent a wonderful morning in Stockhill Wood in the Mendip Hills enjoying the subtlety of the of the first autumn colours this week. I arrived about half an hour before sunrise in the hope there would be some mist. There was, so I headed over to the east side of the woodland where I could make the most of the light from the rising sun.
Sometime ago I came across a small wooden gate at the end of a path in the woods which leads into a field. I have always felt that this gate, standing on the divide between woodland and open space, would make a great image, but it needed the right conditions to really work. Despite several visits, the right conditions had so far eluded me. Would today finally be the day everything falls into place?
The time of the sunrise came and went and even accounting for the elevation of the hills to the east, the sun was late. I couldn’t see the horizon due to the mist, but some cloud had obviously moved in, or the mist here was much thicker than I had realised. I was starting to think I was going to go home empty handed again when I noticed a feint glimmer of warm light in the mist. As the seconds ticked by, the glimmer became a glow, then suddenly it was a wall of fire behind the trees. There was my image!
The mist lingered for another hour before it was finally burnt off by the sun, but not before I had made a handful of misty autumn images and a few pre-selected spots in the woods.
