The sun continued to shine throughout my weekend in Galway and yesterday we took advantage of it with a walk in the woods near Monivea, which isn’t far from where we were staying. I brought a camera along with me, but decided to limit myself to a single lens. A single fixed focal length lens at that – a 50mm f/1.8 lens that I don’t use enough, but that whenever I do, reminds me of what nice images it can create.
The woods are a tranquil, peaceful place, with a couple of paths to walk and places of interest to see nestled within. At their centre sits the Ffrench Mausoleum, which houses the remains of members of the Ffrench family who in the late 19th century owned the 10,000 acre Monivea demesne.
The woods, much smaller now, is under the care of Coillte and is a long established public amenity alongside the main street through Monivea. It is a lovely area to walk in, and to take photographs in, and the sunlight shining through the trees created a lovely dappled lighting over the woodland floor yesterday. This photograph was taken as we walked from the mausoleum to the Ice House which was once used for the storage of meat and perishable goods.
I found it an interesting challenge – one which I will try again – to use a fixed focal lens for all the images I shot, especially as 50mm on a D300 is equivalent to 75mm on a full frame camera and so is quite a long lens for landscapes in particular. Not being able to zoom in or out took much of the control of composition away from me, and any control I did have was only through moving myself closer to or further away from the subject I was photographing.
I must have given up almost entirely on composition for this landscape shot, ending up with a tree trunk bang in the centre of the frame, which is something I would usually try to avoid. Even so I still like the image, which captures the woods as I remember them, and I like how the light helps to separate all the tree trunks from each other.
As well as some shots of the woods, I used the same lens to photograph some flora and fauna, getting in close for some shots of bees – one of which I will post tomorrow.
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