River Avon looking towards the Kelston Brass Mill

Wide Wednesday: Water

This is a shot of the River Avon by the Jolly Sailor pub in Saltford, looking north towards the former Kelston Brass mill, which was still functioning as recently as 1925, so not actually that recently I suppose.  Saltford too had a brass mill, which is about half a mile upstream of this shot.  Unfortunately, it seems that quite a bit of the work originally produced by these mills was for use as trade goods going to Africa out of the port of Bristol, as a part of the slave trade.   This is not something that anyone in this part of the world likes to be reminded of nowadays but it is an important part of the local history none the less.

I've been playing with some of the filters that I received for my birthday a few months ago, as (I hope) you can see.  This shot has involved a combination of a graduated neutral density filter (to bring out the detail in the sky) and a stopper, to allow a sufficiently long exposure to blur the river as it went over the weir.    

I'm gradually starting to get the hang of using them I think.  Some care is required, to think through the sequence of assembling the kit safely.  There's a fair bit of faffing involved, and I can see that it would be all too easy to drop something on the ground, or even worse, into the river.  I can also see that the neutral density filter, being a plastic of some sort, is going to get scratched fairly quickly however careful I am with it.  

I'm looking forward to trying to do more of this sort of thing in the months ahead, all being well.