Keeping life varied is the key to getting through the Lockdown and night time walks add a difference to the routine. I am fortunate to live in a typical English village with a high street and local shops. During Lockdown the traffic flow has decreased although the cars do travel through at speed.
Many of the village shop lights are on and there are a few people moving around. The busiest places are the chemist, the 24 hour convenience store and Tesco. All the restaurants are offering takeaways. A click and collect meal may make a difference to breaking the monotonous existence of lockdown. However, it is an expensive one, compared to making your own meals at home. A feature of the weather is the amount of rain that we have been having. The rain has been intensive leading to major puddles in the street. My new camera has a tilting screen making it easier to take photographs with when bending down. The iPhone does a great job but with absence of a flip screen you have to get quite low to see the screen. These days I find one of the problems is getting back to a vertical standing position after crouching down.
The shop windows are pretty, and some still have the Christmas decorations in them as people are not inclined to do much during the pandemic. The lights at night are fun to photograph and some of the shop windows like the travel agent remind you of times gone by. I also walk towards the level crossing at Bentley Health and the footbridge is a perfect place to take pictures of the trains going into Birmingham. I tend to go out walking with the dog and he does not always appreciate the waiting around for the trains to go by. The picture I took was of a train into Birmingham. The term “Night Train” came to mind and I saw that Steve Winwood had a song by that name on one of his albums.
There was a picture that I saw on Instagram from one of my contacts taking pictures of petrol stations and wondered why would they being doing that? Here I am taking pictures of the Shell petrol station at night.
I have to say it does have an interesting almost timeless atmosphere about doing such photographs. The bright lights against the black sky give it importance. A staging post of interplanetary travel maybe? I found the change of time for my lockdown photography made the difference. It was a different challenge taking the pictures at night. No light trails in this set of photographs but I will look to do some later in the month.
Photographic tip – There were two or three pleasing photographs. The reflected puddle one was interesting as the woman came out of nowhere and made the story. I am not sure if she did have the takeaway with her. The night train picture was after a lot of hanging around waiting for the trains to appear. The petrol station was an idea that I copied from someone else.
