A day in The Fens

Around four years ago, armed with a 6x6 folding camera, I took a trip over to Spalding power station which lies in an area known as the Lincolnshire Fens. I took one photo (see above) and then for whatever reason decided that was enough and headed home. I vowed to return but in fact wouldn’t for quite some time, partly due to a pandemic and partly due to the birth of our daughter. These minor distractions aside, I happened to have a day to myself recently and thought it was high time I had a day out in the car and went off in search of interesting things in an area defined by its total lack of elevation.

In truth I’d been thinking about this trip for a good while, too much time spent on Google street view scoping out potential photo spots and realising I would need about a solid month to visit all the places I’d pinned on Maps. I’m easily overwhelmed and oddly when faced with the opportunity to actually go out and tick a few of these pins off the map I really didn’t want to go, in fact after the first spot turned out to be a total bust I just wanted to drive home. But I stuck to it and even though a few others weren’t quite how I envisioned them I still came away with some photos I liked and a better idea of what I would do next time, hopefully sooner than 4 years this time.

Right after I snapped the photo above I happened upon an incredible little petrol station with a few classic cars in the forecourt so naturally I pulled in to get some photos. The house next door looked pretty run down so after knocking on the door and receiving no answer I figured the place wasn’t being lived in and merrily set the tripod up for some photos. Not 30 seconds later a lady appeared and she didn’t look best pleased! A man then also appeared and beckoned me over to the back of the house where they had presumably been sitting just waiting for an opportunity to give me a good dressing down. What followed was a rant about me being on private land, no they weren’t selling any of the cars although I hadn’t actually asked and then about 20 minutes of moaning about the youth of today, politicians and some NIMBY views on a new reservoir planned for the area. I later googled the place and some others on Flickr had had similar experiences which was both amusing and also a bit sad, it was a really interesting place and clearly one that gets quite a bit of attention. Clearly this isn’t received well by the owners and they asked me to delete any photos that I had taken which I dutifully did, they weren’t great anyway.

Back on the road and far away from any grumpy residents, I headed to my next couple of spots which were some pumping stations. Due to it’s low lying land, The Fens is liable to flooding and must therefore be routinely ‘drained’, with water in the network of drainage ditches being pumped out to the larger rivers. Driving around I saw a few of the pumping stations which are scattered all over the area, often at the very end of the long straight ‘droves’ which mostly lead to a dead end, intersected by these long drainage ditches. I really like these buildings and will look to photograph more of them, the more recently built ones are nondescript in appearance, lacking any flourishes of aesthetic thought whilst the older ones have more character. Function over form although I did notice that they all shared this blue coloured railing which was a pleasing continuity between them.

I’m looking forward to another trip out to The Fens at some point, I’ve still got tons of places to visit and there’s definitely an air of mystery about the area, you just never know what you might find! This recent outing was also a good reminder to not set my expectations too high when heading out with the camera, it’s all too easy to be disappointed when you have some potentially good photos in mind, only to find that they just don’t work in reality or something has changed making the scene not what you wanted it to be. Given the size of the area I’m working with too there’s simply so much ground to cover and whilst there’s literally no rush to take photos, I’m very good at inflicting pressure on myself to do things as quickly as possible. Realistically it’ll be a while before I can return but now that the ball is rolling I feel more confident about getting out with the camera and accepting when things don’t go right that’s simply the way it is.

Talking of cameras I’m still enjoying the 5D Classic, all the images here were taken with it and I did way less editing than I would usually do with my Fujifilm cameras. I recently picked up a 28mm lens which I through would be ideal for the wide open landscapes but it was actually too wide in practice, making it challenging to isolate a subject. The 50mm worked better although I wish I’d taken my 40mm pancake lens as this could’ve been a nice inbetween.

My only gripes so far are firstly the 5D autofocus sucks at big apertures, anything below f2.8 is basically unusable as it just never seems to nail the focus. Not a big deal for landscapes but very frustrating for portraits. Which brings me to my other gripe which is the abomination that is the rear LCD, the low resolution makes it impossible to see for sure if something is in focus as the image is always soft in appearance. The colour is also way off what the actual image looks like so not ideal but still workable. I have been looking at a replacement like the 6D or a later 5D but the colours from the original are really nice in my opinion. Narrow depth of field on full frame just hits different too, when it does actually focus correctly that is! Here’s a photo of my trusty steed, I think this was f2.8 but the OOF fall off is much more pleasing than what I’ve found in crop sensors.

It had crossed my mind to look into a Fujifilm XT series or sell an organ for a GFX system but I’m finding using an optical viewfinder a really refreshing experience over EVFs. There’s something about seeing something without a screen interpreting it first that reminds me of shooting 35mm and although an EVF is super useful for nailing exposure etc, I think if I can find another Canon body with my moans addressed then I’ll be happy..for a while.

That’s it for now, bye.