Flowers in The Rain (An Irish Summer's Day in an Urban Farm)
Near to where I live is what is a rather remarkable place to find in a city. Called “Airfield”, it is a 38 acre site which features a 19th century estate, gardens and a fully working farm. I seem to have a thing for estates and gardens recently. There’s actually 4 of these in a half hours driving distance of me. But this one isn’t on the outskirts of Dublin, its actually in one of its busiest suburbs, and only a few km from the city centre. In fact you could drive by it and not even realise its there.
Recently, on an overcast and rainy day, my wife and I paid a visit to the estate for a walk around the gardens, to get away from the outside world for a few hours. The main house has several gardens, with numerous flowers and fruit of all kinds. You could spend hours just photographing these, but that would just be a fraction of the grounds. There is also a wild flower garden here, and some apple and pear trees.
Further away from the house along one of the walkways through the site you come to the vegetable gardens, where there is everything from grape vines to tobacco plants and tomatoes. There are also animals with everything from chickens to sheep and cows. There are usually pigs too, but I didn’t see any there that day. In one spot there was some old farm machinery that was becoming overgrown by the grass and wild flowers, which was perfect for my urban decay obsession (although, I guess this would be rural decay?)
In terms of the actual photographs, I used my Sony A6000 with the Sigma 30mm lens. It was a great combo for this as it allowed me to get relatively close to the plants and from all different angles. The sigma 30mm is actually a great lens, despite being ridiculously cheap. There is a lovely character to the lens, and even in the dim light of an overcast Irish summers day, I was still able to shoot wide open on base ISO and get some lovely results. The hardest thing when editing was culling down the number of photos that I liked in order to go in this post.
