A encounter with the flyboys

There are very few people who can say that, at some point during their life, they have never needed to cross a river.

Thankfully, during mankind's long and illustrious history, humans have perfected a wide variety of inventions to simplify this process. These range in complexity from handily placed planks, to planks arranged into complex structures known as boats and bridges.

Unfortunately, there are occasions where these inventions are unavailable and there is little choice other than to remove certain items of clothing and take the plunge.

This is the situation I found myself in today. For reasons familiar to poultry humour aficionados worldwide, I needed to cross the river to get to the other side. Duly, I stripped down to my finest blue boxers and matching t-shirt and stepped out into the torrent.

I tentatively forged my way through the biting cold water towards the far bank, occasionally flinching at the broken Victorian glass littering the old mill-river. Before I knew it, I was halfway across the Whiteadder.

It was at this moment, that a bunch of RAF chaps, lets call them Johnny, Dicky, and wing-commander Benjamin "tree-scraper" Huntington, decided to turn up in their most flashy, over-the-top, and, quite frankly, brutish, display of human river-crossing prowess; a bright yellow Sea King helicopter.

Dicky's state of the art heat seeking camera would have spotted the old Oxonian floundering thigh-deep in river from over two miles away. Within the next second the helicopter's camera/computer combination would have checked my face against a billion possibilities and identified me as someone who used to light fires in alleyways and put soap on his sister's toothbrush; I am perhaps a little pesky, but not quite a threat to national security.

Once all of this this was evident, Dicky would have alerted navigator Johnny to my presence. The young recruits would instantly have spotted the potential to have a little fun, and bashfully persuaded the wing-commander to let them have their game.

The game in question involved hovering 30 meters above the head of the unsuspecting river-crosser. Caught in the downdraft, my t-shirt instantly lost all shape and form, billowing hopelessly around my head whilst my boxers deserted my thighs and headed downwards towards the relative shelter of my water-covered knees.

All dignity lost I cowered for a minute in the full force of the the "tree-scraper's" downdraft, before Johnny, Dicky, and Benjamin headed back to base to tell the chaps of their latest japes and place the footage on youtube.

I however was left cold, wet, and dejected in the middle of the river. Whatever was on the other bank that had previously seemed so important had been blown away along with my dignity.

Thank you very much flyboys.

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.