The weekend, such a relaxing and chilled time in the Bould household... nope! It's been a rather busy one again with 3 sunsets and 2 sunrises in succession, needless to say, we are both very tired. Todays blog entry covers location number 25 which is Alderman's Hill in Saddleworth. I could actually see the hesitation in Tracy's face when I told her it was the big hill next to The Trinnacle (where Tracy got injured). Nevertheless, we hopped in the car and drove for what felt like forever, arriving at about 7PM. The ascent up the hill was steep, we arrived earlier than usual so we could take our time. I wouldn't describe the walk as pleasant, but it made a nice change from rushing.
The views from the summit were stunning, strangely though we couldn't find a composition that appealed. One of the biggest difficulties with landscape photography in the summer months is that everything is green. It's not until Autumn approaches that different colours begin to emerge, making for much more interesting scenes. It also didn't help that both reservoirs were shadowed from either the cloud or surrounding hills. We decided to move, it just wasn't working for us. Tracy noticed a monument in the distance, it was a bit of a walk, we knew that we wouldn't have time to get back before the sun set if the viewpoint was no good.
It was worth it, the viewpoint was measurably better than what we had left behind. We tried a couple of different compositions, mainly using the monument as a focal point. The photos weren't terrible but something just wasn't right about it. We decided to try the rocks which were to the left of the monument. That way we could have a nice bit of foreground interest with the gorgeous sunset colours but still have the monument in the middle-ground and then the distant hills in the back. This is the photo we came away with:
The sunset its self was rather beautiful so we got a couple of shots of that and then one of Grace:
We got back to the car at about 10:30PM, we hadn't hadn't eaten anything since lunch time. Begrudgingly, we did a search for the closest McDonalds and set off. I can't honestly remember what town this particular McDonalds was in but it was on a shabby high street with no drive through. We parked about 50 feet away, there were 2 door staff at the entrance, a bit strange for a high street with no-one on it. As we got closer to the front door it soon became obvious what the need for door staff was; there were 2 groups of lads messing around on the market stalls opposite. All of a sudden there was a very loud bang, immediately afterwards one of the lads 'collapsed' onto the ground whilst some of the others ran off. "Has that guy just been shot?". We looked to the door staff, they didn't flinch, but neither did the guy on the ground. A few seconds later the rest of the group started laughing. It was a prank, Tracy and I were the victims of it. We bought a couple of Big Macs and left in a hurry, a bit of a strange end to the night, but entertaining in heindseight.