Visit to Fairlands Valley Park Stevenage
This weekend Emma and Jan went to a Birthday party (well Emma was invited, Jan went to look after her) so James and I had an hour or so to find something to do while we waited for them. As is quite often the case on these sort of occasions we went to the Park in Fairlands Valley and I took my camera along.
Since we only had an hour, James very fairly said that I could have 30 minutes ‘doing my photograph stuff’ and he would have 30 minutes in the playground. This seemed fair so we got to the park and started to walk round the top end whilst I found some suitable subjects. It was quite a murky day so I set the ISO on the camera to 500 so I could have a chance of hand holding shots with my Tamron 70 – 300mm zoom.
We walked past a few people fishing and I stopped to take some pictures of the ducks and geese, one of whom was quite interested and had a good look at what I was doing. The water is quite deep at some points round the bank so I was trying to take pictures as I kept one eye on what James was doing in the background, but he was quite preoccupied with practising spin bowling along the path.
At the end of the path we walked across to the other lake where I got some shots of the plants and some more ducks. I also took this picture of the stones along the edge of the lake which were arranged as stepping stones, so I balanced myself rather precariously over one of them to get the correct low angle as if they were actually stones across the lake. With a wide aperture I could get the end of the line just the right amount of out of focus so it gives the impression of depth but retains the image of what the stones are. Unfortunately, because of the angle, they aren’t straight stepping stones, so anyone using them would fall off !! I might try that again on our next trip.
After taking a few pictures of the plants along the lake side, James worked out that his 30 minutes had started, so we went off to the playground next to the new water park. James had a run about, trying out all the different bit of equipment and I took a quick snap of him which I uploaded to facebook from my new Samsung Wave phone. After a few minutes running about James had an ice-cream and then we started back to the car-park. Just as we got to the top of the hill looking over the lake the sun came through what looked like totally grey sky and lit up the lake with a real sparkle. I managed to fire off a couple of shots, the best of which is above.
The pictures are all on my Flickr photostream.
