alan frost photography

A return to Bath and an alternative view

By alan frost on April 24, 2015

At the end of October last year I spent a very enjoyable day in the beautiful Georgian city of Bath in Somerset, on a photographic workshop with Andy Beel FRPS. I wrote about it here. More recently I was travelling back from South Wales and had agreed to pick up my daughter in Bath and we would return home together. The weather was very different to my previous visit. It had been raining heavily in the morning and by the time I arrived in Bath the rain had stopped but it was still grey and overcast. This was in complete contrast to the bright sunshine I had experienced towards the end of last year. I had a couple of hours to kill and decided that I would try and adopt an alternative approach to before. The weather conditions offered very different lighting and I thought I would challenge myself by sticking to just one lens – the Olympus 75mm f1.8 on the Olympus EM1. Because of the crop factor this lens equates to a 150mm on a full frame 35mm camera. Ordinarily this is not  the lens I would choose to take photographs in a crowded city with large buildings and confined areas in which to work. Reach for the wide angle, others might say; try to get everything into the shot. Although I covered a similar area I was looking for new angles and arguably the less glamorous parts of the city which had been the obvious things to shoot last time round. I finished up with the selection you can see here.

I took great pleasure from revisiting Bath and taking an alternative view. When I compare this set of images with those I took at the tail end of last year, there are some common features, but I think the overall impression they give of the city is very different. I also enjoyed restricting myself to just one prime lens. It made me look for images which only worked with a more limited and compressed depth of field. If you missed the link to my earlier post on Bath, it’s here. Do click on any of the images to view a larger version which will open in a new window.