kent downs Archives - Stewart Mckeown Photography

Jan 01

by stew in field report 0 comments tags: aonb, fog, kent, kent downs, landscape, mist, photography, summerhouse hill

Behind the shot: A Kent Downs Cloud Inversion

Behind the scenes look at a photograph I took at the beginning of December 2019 on the Kent Downs. As I write this on New Year’s Eve, there has not been much winterly weather so far here in Kent with the only real spell of cold weather occurring at the start of the month. This brief 3-day spell did produce some fantastic mist and frost though which I am always keen to make use of in my landscape photography. I have been shooting this area of the Kent Downs nr Folkestone quite a bit over the past couple of years and I had a list of the views I wanted to capture in the forecasted cold snap. The first shot I got on that initial cold morning was this panoramic from Farthing Common. I could see the landscape was covered in a frost as I passed in the car and with sunrise only a few minutes away I decided to grab this rather than risk missing out around the corner. The next morning had very similar conditions. Low winds and low temperatures overnight is usually a good indicator for mist but again it did not occur on the Downs. Perhaps […]

Dec 01

by stew in field report 0 comments tags: fog, kent downs, mist, postling

Postling: The 23rd of January Trilogy

Postling is pretty village nestled in the Kent Downs near the coastal towns of Folkestone and Hythe. From the church it’s just a short but steep walk up on to the surrounding ridge that enables marvellous views of the Kent countryside all the way to the Channel. This is a shot from one of my first visits in early Autumn. I liked this angle of the church with the wooded ridge in the distance acting as a counterweight. I like the way the light tinges the trees but the Sun is at the wrong angle to highlight the church and it gets lost because of this. If only we had some mist to isolate the spire I thought… I’ve found mist on the downs to be rather elusive over the years. I’ve been disappointed many times when a good looking forecast has come to nothing but as Joe Cornish says, to be a landscape photographer you must be an optimist so it was with this attitude that I set my alarm to get up early on the 23rd January 2014. As I made my way along Stone Street in the […]

Apr 13

by stew in field report 0 comments tags: kent, kent downs, photography, snow, winter

Snow Day 2018

Welcome! In this blog I’ll be going over what I did during the recent snow spell on the Kent Downs. According to my Lightroom catalogue, there hadn’t been a sustained period of snow in Kent that I could get out to photograph since 2013. Shortly afterwards I remember writing a list of all the places I should visit next time to fully make use of the fluffy white stuff. Good planning, except that 5 years later when the list could finally be utilised, we got so much snow that the locations were inaccessible anyway! So, on the morning of the 27th February I wasn’t left with much choice where to visit. I decided to go to the nearby Chartham Downs as I knew the area well and I was fairly sure I could get there safely. On arrival the layby I usually park in looked like a disaster waiting to happen so I had to park at the end of the road and make the walk through the fields to get to the spot I had in mind. It was a bit of a slog as you can see from the video On route through the […]