A Northumberland weekend

Spent a few days in Northumberland over the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend. Didn’t take quite as many photos as I expected – not quite sure why – but there is something about this course in the reasons. Can’t quite put my finger on it but it feels that many of the the things I used to shoot are losing interest for me – I don’t have the urge to shoot flowers and pretty landscapes at present, and I keep asking myself, “What am I trying to say with this shot?” and if I can’t think of an answer I don’t press the shutter. While that may be good in some ways – who needs a hard drive full of pictures of buttercups – a part of me worries that in striving to make my photography ‘better’ (whatever that means) I may be losing some of the fun. Our visit to Lindisfarne typifies the experience. Previously I would have come back with 50-60 shots – mainly of obscure stonework – whereas this time – if we ignore bracketing the total is about 8!! Perhaps the answer is that the fun was in pressing the shutter and collecting.

Anyway, I appear to have substituted trying to take something more meaningful for simply amassing a huge number of shots to ‘prove’ (to whom?) that I’m a keen photographer. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it isn’t. I’m guessing the secret is working out how to make the meaningful stuff fun on a more regular basis – I’m also guessing that when the meaningful stuff is not fun, it’s probably less meaningful.

Anyway – enough theorising – time for some photos. First up Lindisfarne – and only two shots that I thought were worth showing.

The first is an attempt to catch the historic image that the tourist brochures harp on about. The two kids on the wall caught my eye at about the same time as the view of the castle beyond the abbey.

The second shot – which I’ve already posted on my photo-a-day blog – catches more of what I felt about the place. Forget the beauty,  forget the spirituality – it struck me as a giant celtic themed gift shop – not so much spirituality as spirits.

Not quite sure how to tag this post – not even sure it belongs in this course, other than that I have tried to capture my sense of the place at the time I visited it.