Today’s post is a photograph that I really like, and that turned out exactly as I had planned when I took the shot – which is very often not the case. It’s a photograph I took outside Charles Fort in Kinsale on a sunny September afternoon last year, although it could almost have been taken any time in the last 40 years. And that was exactly what I had in mind when I framed the shot.
I was actually in Kinsale for the joint stag weekend of two friends of mine. I had paid a visit home to Murragh on the Friday night and made my way to Kinsale on the Saturday to catch up with a mostly hungover group who were just beginning to surface after the night before. The initial plan for the Saturday afternoon had been to go deep sea fishing and, having had some unpleasant experiences with boats in recent years, I wasn’t overly keen on the idea. A suggestion by John for him, me and Michael – all three of us keen photographers – to take some photographs around the town instead sounded like a good plan to me.
As it turned out the deep sea fishing was cancelled and replaced with some beach soccer, but the three of us still set off with our cameras for Charles Fort which is a 17th-century star-shaped fort a couple of miles outside the town. We took a few shots around the harbour as we walked over to the fort, stopping occasionally on the walk for one or other of us to frame a photograph. The sun was bright in the sky, and the light was harsh, making good shots of the harbour itself hard to get due to glare from the sea.
As we arrived outside the entrance to the fort, I noticed a green VW Beetle parked across the road. As I’ve mentioned before, a life long love of the Herbie films has endeared me to these cars, so I decided to take a photograph.
I noticed the old farm building behind the car and across the tarmacadam road the walk down to the entrance of the fort was paved with cobble stones. I knew the cobble stones, the car and the building together were elements of a nice image, but the shot would be spoiled by the tarmac road (complete with newly painted white lines) that the car was actually parked on, and that spanned the 20 feet between me and the car. However the incline of the cobble stones and the slight fall off of the road beyond them allowed me to frame the shot I wanted by putting the camera low down, so that the road was no longer visible, giving the illusion that the car was parked on the cobble stones itself.
Two things slightly interfere with this illusion – the wheels of the car are cut off because of the low angle I had to shoot from, and the shallow depth of field in the foreground hints at the car being further away than you might otherwise expect. I’ve often thought about trying to clone in the bottom of the wheels, but I doubt I could achieve a natural effect, and I’ve often thought about cropping out some of the foreground, but I can never decide on a crop I like. So I’ve left the image as you see it here.
I like to think it’s a look back in time at a scene you might have observed at Charles Fort in the past, and to emphasize that feel I’ve added a slight sepia tone in post processing. I did clone out a mobile phone mast which is now mounted on that farm building as it single handedly would have spoiled the timeless quality of the image, and if it hadn’t been for that mast, as I crouched down to take the shot and looked at the scene through my viewfinder, I could almost have convinced myself it was 1978, and not 2008.
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