To break up the long six hour+ journey to our cottage in Cornwall, Leanne and I stopped off at the Eden Project. Click here to view her photos! We brought our tickets online and printed them off but when we got there the normal ques were huge, we looked for a pre-paid ticket section which we found to be closed and decided to just walk through the nearest doors, which in fact led behind the tills and we walked casually through without showing anyone our tickets……nice security…. kind of a shame it cost us nearly £40 when we walked in unquestioned but hey!
The Eden bubble/dome structures were what drew me to the Eden Project.
Above the forest floor, 50m up (which is taller than the tower of London!) is the rainforest lookout platform.
I found the patterns that the biome structures made fascinating.
The first place we visited was the Rainforest Biome. Our lenses took a good 15 minutes to clear of condensation but after that it was pleasant to be in the warm. Around 20 minutes later however it become more uncomfortable as the thick hot air took it’s toll especially since we were dressed for winter!
Next up the mediterranean biome. We expected it to be at least kind of hot but I didn’t feel any kind of heat at all in the place. It wasn’t cold, it was just slightly warm…. It was an odd place to say the least. Not so odd were the beautiful tulips!
Next up the odd……
Didn’t think a person with a moon for a head would be as scary as it is.
I wasn’t sure what this was but because of the moonhead person I am going to guess it represents the sun.
I have no idea why there were rabbit heads on sticks….
Going outside of the biomes didn’t end the weirdness either. This guy is called the ‘WEEE Man’ sculpture. He weighs 3.3 tonnes and was made to represent the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment te average British household throws away in a lifetime. The WEEE man is made up of this.
The huge bee sculpture was really interesting. It looked a bit lost because of the season we are in and how bare the outside grounds were of flowers but still it was cool. The sculpture is there to remind visitors how important pollinators are to grow our food.
One of the only plants that was in bloom were the daffodils!
On the way out I found this really really weird plant. I haven’t see anything like it. It had very small orange dots all over it too. Weirddddddd.
The Eden Project was interesting but it disappointed me a little. Maybe it was the season we went in. There were hardly any flowers outside (kind of to be expected, though because you are missing half of what it’s about they could reduce ticket prices for off season?) Comparing it to the incredible Kew Gardens I would pick that over Eden Project every time. However I am still glad I went and experienced it, the biome structures alone were interesting enough to go and see. It made a good break for our six+ hour journey to our cottage in Cornwall.
My new bag (Lowepro Mini Trekker) and new lens (sigma 150mm to 500mm). Photo taken by Stacey.
I kept the iso to around 400, f-stop to around 7.1 and shutter speed above 250 for all of these shots, all taken with the sigma 150-500mm.
The sun went in and it was overcast but alas tried to get a good photo of dandelion seeds flying off the stem. I cranked the iso up to the max as to get a faster shutter which as you can see made the image quite noisy. I also don’t like the composition but the colours are nice. Despite the fact it wasn’t actually the best lens to shoot this kind of photo (I wanted to test my new toy out as much as possible) I though id post the result anyway.
Chill Cleal 