Tatton Park Mansion

You can see from the threatening cloud in the image above, that my visit to Tatton Park was during mixed weather! I made that photo while the sun was out, minutes later it was raining and time to be inside! The mansion took an earlier house, added, extended and remodelled it between 1780 and 1813. It became a National Trust property in 1958.

It’s always pot luck trying to make photo’s in a house. Like most, Tatton allows photography without tripod or flash, so it’s always the low light level that’s the challenge. Combine that with paintings, tapestries, and in the case of Tatton, some documents, the light levels are often kept deliberately low. That said the F3 with the 35mm f2, coped well considering I had loaded a Kodak Color Plus 200! A 400 would have been a better choice, but I had none, and of course the days of the shop selling film have long gone!

If I’m totally honest, in most of these houses, the portraits of family members and fancy furniture don’t interest me that much. How early versions of things that we now take for granted – such as electricity, refrigeration and cooking are incorporated does. So I soon found myself “below stairs”.