When I heard about the Festival of Light event at Longleat I knew I had to go and get some photographs for the blog. In terms of night time light events I’ve experienced it’s second only to the ‘fire garden’ event at Stonehenge as part of cultural celebrations of the London 2012 Olympics.
The Festival of Light is the first cultural event of its kind in Europe and consists of twenty hand-crafted displays built and placed by a team of over one hundred from the Sichuan province in China.
The scale of the works, dotted around Longleat House, is simply amazing. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the evening I went and as you’ll see below there was lots of space to get photographs.
Because of the dark conditions and high contrasting lights I took my trusty Olympus OMD E-M1 and 25mm f1.8 lens (a great combination for low light and sharp photographs) and one leg of my Three Legged Thing tripod called Brian as a monopod. Someone walked past and commented that it was the biggest selfie stick they’d ever seen… sometimes I despair! Most of the photos were taken in aperture priority mode and using the monopod to reduce any camera shake.
I really hope Longleat do something similar next winter, I’d love to spend more time wandering around getting even more photos.
