the CHALLENGE
rod Ireland cordially invited me to speak at the Northern Photography Show, hosted at the delightful Rheged Centre in Cumbria, over the weekend of the 12-13 May 2018. After the show was over (and with the weather forecast looking quite promising) rather than head home, I decided to spend a couple of days in The Lake District in my camper van…
Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Plus, it was an ideal opportunity to produce a gallery for the N-photo challenge!
Daunted and haunted (as all landscapers are) by Ansel Adams’ infamous words: “12 significant photographs in any one year is a good crop,” I attempted, with varying degrees of success, to complete my task of a dozen shots in 24 hours…
All of the images in this article are from the lakeside, on the water and in the hills around Ullswater in Cumbria; they were all captured using a Nikon D810 with Mirror Lock-up mode activated and electronic first curtain shutter engaged – whenever the conditions permitted it.
4:38 AM
Lakeside silhouettes
It was roughly half an hour before sunrise and light levels and temperatures are rapidly rising. Even though a mere 18 minutes have elapsed since my first shot, the foreground and mid-ground shadow areas are already revealing a lot more detail. The challenge on this occasion was the utterly cloudless sky.
Relocating into the trees on the shoreline provided opportunities to use the environment; I used the leafless branches as delicatelydetailed, frame-filling silhouettes against the colours of daybreak overhead and the reflections in the lake’s surface. As with the first shot, I used my nifty fifty. Sharp, fast and light, it provides a pleasingly natural look because of its ‘normal’ field of view and its rather negligible perspective compression.
4:20 AM First light
Sunrise was at 5:09am. I was up and out of the camper by 4:00am and this was my first shot of the day. A classic mirror image, using my 50mm, with the early colours of the pre-dawn lighting up the skies beyond the hills. No ambient light on the landscape yet, so the background shapes appear as silhouettes. This low-light shot works well and conveys the early mood of the magical transition zone between darkness and dawn.
5:46 AM
Cumbrian mirror
With my 70-200mm f/2.8 FL lens at roughly 180 degrees to the rising sun, it’s about half an hour after dawn in this image and sunlight appears just on the peaks of the crags around Ullswater – a truly wonderful sight to behold!
I think what makes this shot is, as in the first image of the day, I was fortunate enough to have lingering, super-calm, almost entirely windless conditions early that morning.
The surface of the lake appeared almost like a sheet of mirrored glass. I know the dawn-mist-chasing brigade will lament the lack of it – and it’s true that there’s nowhere near enough to make the image totally banging… but if you look closely enough, you can actually see a tiny patch of it clinging to the trees, see? Right there, in the middle of the shot…
5:48 AM
Reflected foliage
Always be on the lookout for alternative or unusual ways to shoot commonplace stuff. Reflections in water typically provide opportunities to do this. We’re well into the golden hour with this one – I have isolated the reflected image of some branches and foliage on the edge of the lake with a 200mm focal length.
The rippling water gives the shot its painterly, impressionistic look and raises it above what could easily have been a fairly ordinary photo of the lakeside trees in morning light. I was planning to produce some intentional camera movement (ICM) shots around the lake but, as scenic interpretations, my ‘reflection collection’ turned out so agreeably that ICMS slipped my mind and I never got around to them. I have inverted the image in post to maintain the natural up-down orientation of the trunks and branches. In my opinion, it works on this occasion.
5:51 AM Against a dark background
(Yes, Iain Banks is totally a personal hero…) Apart from the oblique sunlight being softened and filtered by the trees and foliage on the left side of the frame, virtually the whole of the hillside is plunged into shadow. A brief moment of direct golden hour sunlight is falling solely onto the island on the edge of the lake; illuminating the tiny subject and providing a very strong visual punctuation to the scene.
Again, it’s a view that, before the ephemeral moment was gone, I shot a number of times at a variety of focal lengths with my 70-200mm f/2.8 FL. In the end, I preferred the bifurcated shots with a solid wall of shadowy background that emphasized the minimal size of the island beneath the looming crag. Filling the frame and eliminating any ridgeline/skyline makes the background appear more monolithic and mysterious.
6:10 AM Backlit bonsai
The last moments of the golden hour; pale, creamy sunlight still, but we’ll soon be into hour after relentless hour of full-spectrum light. We’re going to have to put our thinking caps on during the course of the day as the day is forecast to be a bit of a photographic challenge; with sunshine and mostly clear skies expected… For now, however, this lakeside tree (or is it a bush? I honestly have no idea) is behaving most accommodatingly by gently filtering the light of the slowly rising sun.
I compressed the perspective and reduced the field of view with a 200mm focal length and the golden light on the foliage contrasts well with the shadowy blue-grey of the lake water; providing a strong figure to ground relationship in this instance. It actually looks excellent as a black and white, but I like the complimentary colour palette, so I went with this one in the end. I shot numerous times in this location and although the backlight and foliage were simultaneously amazing and compelling, I struggled to get a composition that I was completely happy with because of these elements.
This one, in my opinion, was the best of the bunch and reminded me of a bonsai tree – hence the title.
7:43 AM Dandelion at dawn
No more than 50 metres from the edge of the lake and I found myself in a little field of seeding dandelions.
For this shot I used my 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Light levels had risen enough to allow a 1/160 sec shutter speed – even at f/11 and ISO64. So, I picked a dandelion, held it up at arm’s length in front of the tripod-mounted camera, positioned it with glimpses of sky and trees in the background and released the shutter by radio remote.
The incidental light is soft as it’s being filtered by a canopy of foliage above me. And because the dandelion is so close to the lens, even at f/11 (the juiciest piece of the Tokina glass) the depth of field is super-shallow – creating the lovely, gradual out-of-focus fall-off in the seed head that fades into the creamy, bokeh-ed out pastel background.
The horizontal orientation and the out-of-camera 3:2 aspect ratio (rather than the square crop that I anticipated I would prefer) worked best for the central, circular subject. I’m very happy with this one and it’s definitely one of my favourite images of the day.
12:21 pm Dry stone wall
What I’ve tried to do is to think a bit laterally; firstly with the composition, field of view and framing. Secondly with the post-processing of the scene (because the colour version out of camera just didn’t blow my skirt up)... I liked the textures and shapes, but the temperature and quality of the light… not so much.
However, the contrails and stratus were being stretched out and were very agreeably sculpted by a high-altitude breeze, producing attractive patterns in the sky; almost to the point of giving the appearance of a big-stopper long exposure in the final image. To maximize the immensity of this glorious cloudscape I attached my 14-24mm f/2.8 wide-angle zoom. The image is processed using Photoshop’s Black and White filter, with the colour channels tweaked to my own personal preferences.
2:59 pm Afternoon view from the Ullswater steamer
What an absolute pleasure it was to meet the 2015 UK Landscape Photographer of the Year, Mark Littlejohn, at The Northern Photography Show. And then to be offered a trip out onto the lake in the afternoon by the man himself; what an absolute treat, I must say!
The Ullswater Victorian Steamer must be one of the most idyllic beautiful boat trips in the world – and that is no exaggeration. It genuinely is that awesome. I took just one lens with me (yes, you got it) my 50mm f/1.4.
A few summery clouds briefly put in an appearance on the horizon and I guessed that black and white infrared was the way to go in the bright conditions. I do actually have a screw-in 720nm IR filter for my trusty 50mm but, even in bright sunshine, this typically necessitates exposure times of anything up to about a minute, which is absolute rubbish if you’re chugging around a lake on a 19th-century pleasure boat…
So, I shot handheld from the deck of the steamer, with the sun at 90 degrees to maximize the 3D effect of a polarizer on the skyscape. I have processed the original full-colour source file as a black and white infrared in Photoshop. In my opinion, this IR conversion has given the shot a punch and a drama that lifts it way above the original’s rather commonplace, unexceptional blue-sky mood.
5:00 pm Fell walker
Another fluky moment – and what some refer to as a ‘sniper shot.’having headed up into the hills for early evening, I was using my long lens again, experimenting with a variety of compositions as the light and shadows slid languidly over the Cumbrian landscape. Using the shapes, textures and hues of the crags and hillsides, I’d just decided this would make an okay long shot worth taking. Then, as though on cue, a lone rambler appeared from the right side of the frame and walked along the lower ridge, transforming the moment into more of a potential keeper...
What was, up to that point, an exercise in juxtaposing frame-filling triangles and textures had momentarily become about the immensity of the place in human terms. How lucky was that!?
Surprisingly, colour worked better with this one (I’d pre-visualized it as a blackand-white image) because, on adaption, the mono version lost the fantastic impact of the ‘tiny blue man’ on the ridge when he faded to a ‘tiny grey man.’
9:36 pm The end of the day
It was almost half an hour after official sunset time when I shot this one. Still in the hills,
I was randomly exploring unknown territory and was hoping in vain for a last-minute histrionic skyscape to appear magically and dramatize the view – but no such luck. Any clouds that had put in an appearance in the daytime had all quit by late evening. There was only one thing I could do to glean some sort of photograph from this – emphasize the foreground.
This scene actually worked out better in the final analysis than I expected it to after seeing it in the viewfinder. Probably something to do with the 16:9 crop I chose in post that removed unnecessary negative space – where there really was absolutely nothing going on. A 70mm focal length has produced a slight perspective compression and I like the shapes, the contours, the layers and the way the trees establish internal borders, defining a bit of a frame within a frame.
5:02 AM ‘Viv’ at dawn
Not a landscape I know, but I couldn’t resist trying to slip this one past the editor and making a baker’s dozen! This is my Vauxhall Vivaro (hence: ‘Viv’) camper van with the kitchen window reflecting the dawn horizon colours. We’re back where we started – sunrise… And I have to say: nothing beats waking up in your own bed and being right there, on location!
7:28 AM Lillies in the tarn
Okay, okay… Technically not within the 24 hours but one of my favourites…
It just goes to show that landscaping isn’t only about the big view or producing maximum drama. With dull, overcast skies and permanently flat, soft light on offer, my attention was diverted away from the vastness of the rugged crags and rocky fells onto the detail and delicacy of these budding water lily stems and lily pads in a tarn. The softness of the light and the featureless greyness of the sky overhead helped the framing; there are no harsh shadows.
By exposing two-thirds of a stop to the right, I have eliminated most of the irregularity there was in the surface of the water. I tried polarizing the scene, but the mystery of the image was lost by removing the opaque smoothness of the water with the circular polarizer.
I spent a long time faffing about with the framing so that I got rid of as much negative tension as I could among the myriad of elements here. Out of a few shots, this was the best. Abstract at first glance, I like the way that, within a few moments of scrutiny the image reveals its true identity.