Night Photography by Adam Currie

Star trails are what I was after when visiting here. Mainly due to the fact their is little light pollution here and most places around the Petersfield area. I only came away with one photo that I could use, but I think it was good enough to make the trip worth it.

HMS Mercury is now completely abandoned, and the road it’s on is very quiet. The road is also un-lit. This makes it the perfect venue to experiment with super-long exposures and star trails. To find out more about the history of HMS Mercury, visit the Wikipedia page on HMS Mercury.

Here’s the image I came away with:

As part of the weekly Portsmouth at Night Flickr group meet, we visited Warblington Church, Near Emsworth.

The skies were relatively clear with a few groups of cloud dotted around, perfect conditions for this sort of location.

As you can see here, the apparent light pollution that plagues the area really did compliment the result.

One of the memorials in the cemetary.

Taken a while ago now, at Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex. Just thought I’d put this up to keep things looking a bit more fresh on this blog.

St. Huberts Church in Idsworth is another place in my list of sites to re-visit. This list if growing all the time! Anyway, the church is the perfect subject for star trail photos as it is on the top of a hill and it is in a relatively dark area as far as light pollution goes. There is still enough to ruin a long shot but it is much easier to control that down near where I live.

This shot was composed with the intention of having the star trails form a circle. This is done by having the North Star near to the centre of the frame and taking a long exposure photo. This photo was an exposure of about 30 minutes. There were 4 of us who went to this location and we all got fantastic results.

As you can see the light pollution did start to creep and in and try to ruin the shot but luckily it added a nice element to the composition.

A small amount of light painting with a flash gun was used to illuminate the front of the church.

The Lime Quarry in Petersfield is pretty much the epitome of night photography subjects. There are so many interesting abandoned old vehicles. There is a mechanics garage with many tools and vehicle parts all still there.

Being a lime quarry is has the kilns to bake the lime, these are still pretty much in-tact. There are diggers, dump trucks, wheel-barrow type contraptions and much more that I have forgotten about but are really worth a mention! There is so much there to photograph that since the initial visit I have returned to the site again. And hope to in the future as well!

First I will begin with some of the brilliant vintage vehicles that are sprawled across the quarry. These have all faced the test of time and are in a pretty bad way but I feel this definitely adds to the images.

Some sort of truck to carry the lime around.

A bulldozer.

That is just a small example of what the site has to offer, as you can see they make brilliant light painting subjects!

Moving on to other bits and bobs around the site.

Pipe/metal bending machine.

This is a “pool” of vehicle parts in the pit. This is in the mechanics garage.

The coolest part of the quarry is a bit odd, but I am told it has an interesting past. There is a house awkwardly places right in the middle of the quarry. Apparently someone was living in the house before the quarry was even created and refused to budge when being offered a buy-out. It is understandable when you see the area.

The interior and exterior of the house are in very bad shape. A lot of the roof, windows and floorboards are missing. Making it a rather dangerous place to explore with expensive camera equipment. I feel it was well worth the risk.

This is the rear of the house, this gives you a pretty good idea of what I mean by it being in a bad way.

Perished pigeons are what you will find inside!

That’s all for this update folks, much more can be seen if you visit the link below. Thanks for having a look.

See more in the flickr set »