Wollaton Hall Deer Park

 Last week I spoke about our recent trip to Nottingham to visit a dear friend and spent an afternoon in Wollaton Hall & Deer Park, a stately home on the outskirts of the city that is open to the public and is home to a sizeable herd of Deer. Long time readers will know I have seen a Deer near my home just once and I didn't get a photo as I was just as startled as the Deer. I figured I needed to go to where I could photograph some Deer minding their own business.

I had travelled light and had just one roll of Wonderpan loaded in my Minolta Dynax 4, however I had also decided to give my Nokia phone camera a try in case my film skills deserted me. It happens to the best of us and I haven't really paid much attention to my phone camera over the years. This was an opportunity to change that.

The humble phone camera has come a long way since the heady days of the early years of the 21st century when you were lucky to have a couple of mega pixels of resolution to produce photos you could just about print at 6x4 and so noisy you might as well have shot film. Oh the irony.

Now they are the point and shoot we all have in our pocket and they killed the point and shoot camera market stone cold dead. Most videos produced by tik tokers and a sizeable number of you tubers are shot with phone cameras to a decently high standard. My Nokia G42 phone has a good mix of manual and automated controls and I used it on this day as a point and shoot. I used the buit in level guide to help me get my photos straight and let my phone camera do the rest.

We split our afternoon between the Deer and the Hall and to be honest we should have gone in the morning and made a day of it. There's so much to see inside the hall that it's hard to take it all in over one or two hours in the afternoon. Entrance to the park and the hall is free, but there are gift shops where you can buy souvenirs and and make donations to help support the upkeep of this jewel in Nottingham's storied history.

Wollaton Hall was originally built in the 1580's for Sir Francis Whilloughby and over the centuries has been home to Barons, Businessmen and Batman. The hall was used as the location of Wayne Manor in the Christopher Nolan film, Batman - The Dark Knight Rises. It's also 5 miles north of Gotham, the town that lent its name to Gotham City in the Batman canon. The local council bought Wollaton hall in 1925 and it has been open to the public ever since. You can find out more about Wollaton Hall by clicking the link below.

I used my phone camera for some shots of the Deer and all my shots of the Hall, both inside and out. It's filled with artefacts, stuffed animals and a wonderful exhibit of microscopic sculptures done by Dr Willard Wigan MBE. Many of the sculptures are inside the eye of a sewing needle and took weeks of dilligent work to complete. It was making my eyes hurt just trying to comprehend the skills it took to do them.

We stayed in the hall until closing time and we gave a big thank you to the staff who looked after us during our visit. My wife isn't as nimble as she once was and uses a walking aid that doubles as a seat when we are out and about. The Staff made sure we got in and out of the building using the disabled persons lift and were on hand if anyone wanted to ask them questions about the hall and the exhibits. Next time we visit we will be spending a day there.

Here are a few of my favourite phone cam photos I took during our visit. My Nokia G42 phone camera proved to be a very handy point and shoot on the day and I was happy to let it do the heavy lifting. It didn't do too bad to be fair. As always I have placed them and more in an album on my Flickr account you can visit and you can also plan your visit to Wollaton Hall using the links below. I hope you enjoy them.

Wollaton Hall.org.uk 
Wollaton Hall & Deer Park - Nokia G42