Scotland. Just.

For a while now I have been longing to get a proper photographic project under my belt. It is all very well and good jaunting down to Donna Nook or even poking a lens into a garden you know intimately whenever you can, but documenting an area intimately is another thing entirely.

This is what my collegue Samuel Waldron and I will be doing with a small area of the Scottish Borders on the River Whiteadder (pronounced whit-adder) from May to Mid July. We will be doing so under the banner of "Exposing The Wild", a new cooperative venture which will soon be firing on all cylinders. You shall, of course, be the first to know when it is!

From Thursday to Sunday Sam and I were at the site assessing its potential and preparing for the summer shoot. We busied ourselves so much with that that we did not get much photography done, the exception being moonless and cloudless Thursday night when we had a play with star-trails.

The top image is a 20 minute exposure showing the movement of the stars around the pole star. This shot was taken with the lights of Preston in the foreground. With these in the image I was unable to get an exposure longer than 20 minutes without the sky lighting up enough to render the majority of the stars invisible.

This second shot was taken in the opposite direction so light pollution had a much lesser effect. The star trails in this photograph are much longer because the image was taken at right angles to the north star and also because the exposure was 30 minutes long.

Preparation for the summer included searching the woodland for animal signs (such as the badger tracks above - thank you to the members of Wild About Britain for confirmation of this identification) and hide building. We first coppiced an area of willow to provide building materials and an open area for bird hides, before building a simple live woven willow structure with a pine roof. We will add the bird feeders to the area in the spring.

My final shot shows us enjoying "disposing of" the excess willow.