One of the many good things about Suffolk is how many places there are to take photographs, and Orford is high on my list. Part of what draws me there is the finality of the place. Once you arrive, all you can do is turn around and go back the way you came. It is easy to see why the military used it as a staging post for their secret base on Orford Ness. The peninsula was once run by the Ministry of Defence, which carried out secret tests there through both World Wars and the Cold War, and it now belongs to the National Trust.
I had been planning a trip to Orford to shoot the stars for a couple of months with a good friend, Chris. Chris is into astronomy and knows a great deal about star gazing. We had been trying to find an evening when the tide was in and the skies were clear, without luck. Over the last few days the weather turned perfect, and despite the low tide we decided to wrap up warm and go. It was the first really cold night of the year, but it was perfectly calm at the quay and the skies were crystal clear, ideal for star gazing.
Our next mission is to see whether we can capture the International Space Station. Fortunately it is as regular as clockwork, and the times and locations can be planned ahead with the help of some good websites. The weather is the unknown, especially at this time of year, but the unpredictability is half the fun.
Here are a few of the photos I took at Orford. For more of my landscape work, see the landscape section on my website.
