An evening on Lindisfarne

The added bonus of a morning trip to Bass Rock is that you start early and finish by lunch time. So you have the entire afternoon and evening to find other photographic opportunities. I tend to plan my trips in a lot of detail in advance, so I had planned this trip so I could drive south again and get to Lindisfarne before the tide came in. 

Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, is an island off the Northumberland coast. It is connected to the mainland by a causeway, which you can drive along, but you need to know what the tides are doing. The causeway gets completely covered at high tide, but not only that, the tides come in very quickly - reportedly quicker than a galloping horse. There are certainly a number of stories of people getting cut off, and there are a couple of rescue platforms specifically for people to take refuge in if they do.

Lindisfarne contains a large castle and a small village community, with pubs, restaurants etc., surrounded by sand dunes, and at low tide, mudflats.  The whole area is a nature reserve.

It was the sand dunes that I was heading for, primarily with two photographic opportunities in mind.

The first of these was a butterfly - the Dark Green Fritillary.

I hadn't photographed a Dark Green Fritillary before - on a previous visit I hadn't been able to find any. On this occasion though, I soon found a few butterflies resting on a mound. Crawling on my stomach, and using the 100mm macro lens hand held, I managed to get a couple of images of the underside of the butterfly's wings.

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

There turned out to be quite a few Dark Green Fritillaries around, flitting out in the early evening sun, occasionally resting with the their wings open. The main challenge was that they were close to the ground, meaning that the backgrounds were generally more cluttered than I would have liked. However, in the end I was fairly pleased with the results.  

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

Dark Green FritillaryLindisfarne, Northumberland, England

More Dark Green Friltillary images can be found in the gallery here.

The second photographic opportunity I had in mind was orchids. The sand dunes on Lindisfarne are covered in orchids - mainly Common Spotted Orchids and Marsh Orchids.  Unfortunately I was a bit late in the season to photograph these, and most of them had gone over. I did however find one other orchid that I hadn't seen before - the Marsh Helleborine.

After taking a standard record shots,  I tried a couple of different compositions, varying the aperture to give a different feeling to the images.

Marsh HelleborineLindisfarne, Northumberland, UK Marsh HelleborineLindisfarne, Northumberland, UK

Marsh HelleborineLindisfarne, Northumberland, UK Marsh HelleborineLindisfarne, Northumberland, UK