Blea Tarn by Colin S Bell

You’d be forgiven for thinking this site has recently become fixated with the Lake District in general and Blea Tarn in particular. You would be right, as I have felt rather that way since the two weeks I spent up there in November and especially since the morning when I had the place entirely to myself.

That day it all came together – after an hour’s drive I was there for dawn, rolling mists and autumn colours reflected in the tarn’s still surface – and apart from a single dog walker it was all mine, mine, and not another photographer in sight. Funnily enough, once the fog eventually lifted and the breeze picked up, I moved on to nearby Slater’s Bridge and did immediately walk into a pack of 10 photographers with LPS’s John Gravett. John had first introduced me to the tarn’s photographic potential and often takes his guests there, so that morning I’d been a lot luckier than I’d thought. Much as I can be sociable, and know I can  remove other photographers afterwards by pretending they’re dust spots, I am more of a lone hunter and it was a rare privilege to have the place all to myself.

Since then I’ve been itching to get back. Each time I go to the tarn I explore two or perhaps three angles, move on after two or three hours, feeling the shot’s in the bag – and then kick myself for not having spent the whole day there. Next time I’ll take sandwiches and try not to heed the Drunken Duck’s siren call calling me for a lunchtime pint.

For a small area, it’s got so many alternative viewpoints and I was struck by Colin S Bell‘s one here – not least that before sunrise he managed to resist the temptation to set up his tripod down by the tarn’s edges. Lots more on his site.

These are all photographs I’ve taken in my beloved Lake District over the last few years and reworked with a new effect which I found pretty addictive but can’t disclose, not yet anyway. You may of course say it should remain that way, but I rather liked the results and it is my party….

As usual they are being served from my SlideShowPro Director content management system, but I recently heard that they have discontinued the Slidepress plug-in (why is explained here). So instead I am using their Publish mechanism, copying code from Director and pasting it in WordPress. I’m not sure it’s totally reliable and WordPress has a habit of correcting – or rather deleting – the code.

Adam Burton‘s Lake District pictures contained some lovely angles on Blea Tarn. And while here he’s talking about the Langdales in general, I rather feel his comment could apply to this one little spot.

This iconic location is probably my favourite part of the Lake District.  As long as the weather plays along, a photographer could easily spend a week and more photographing the Langdales and never get bored.

Having recently spent a couple of weeks up in the Lake District, I obviously can’t get enough of the region and was thinking about places to go next time. So I found myself browsing one or two sites until I came across John Parminter’s viewlakeland.com which has some lovely scenic work both of the Lakes and Scotland.

This is one of my favourite lakes, Wastwater, but taken from an angle I’d never seen before and which really expresses the power of those impressive scree slopes along the other side.

This afternoon I’d been photographing Tewet Tarn near Keswick. It’s more of an early morning location, hopefully with interesting colour on Blencathra in the background (note to self – no more lazy lie-ins), but I was there from around midday hoping to get a panorama with Skiddaw in the frame too. At this time of year midday light doesn’t always rule out photography and the Lake District’s fast changing clouds will often shape the light so that even when your back is to the sun it’s still possible you’ll be there when there is a sudden dramatic contrast between the hills and the tarn. But today the cloud breaks were brief and seemed to be getting briefer, and it wasn’t really worth staying long as I did – I wasn’t going to get better light. After all, I was thinking, what do you really deserve when you’re almost following others’ tripod holes rather than finding your own views?

And that was when I looked behind me. It’s usually a good idea.

Robin Whalley is a “self taught Landscape Photographer living in Saddleworth near Oldham. He draws his inspiration from the industrial and rugged landscapes of the North of England.” I was enjoying his shots of the Lake District, particularly as I’m planning on getting to Wastwater (shown here) very soon, but also check out his Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile. One day….

Usually every spring the slopes of Rannerdale, Crummock Water, are filled with bluebells. This year though the winter was long, spring was short and very dry, and I’d heard that last November’s floods had brought lots of debris down the hillside. John from LPH hadn’t seen any this year, and none were there last weekend when I drove past. But with my brother saying I could stay as long as I wanted, yesterday I went there again and though it was drab and overcast, it was so spectacular I had to go back this morning.

Just like last year, Focus on Imaging ended on Wednesday evening, we said our goodbyes, and pausing only to marvel at the hotel being filled with well-groomed dogs and their owners checking in for Crufts, off I headed straight up to Borrowdale. The Lake District may be a magnet for photographers but after 4 days surrounded by 35,000 of them, my brother and his wife's holiday home is the perfect place to which I eagerly escape. The iPhone-toting nephew may disagree here, but I like that it is a decent half an hour's walk up Castle Crag if you have to get a mobile phone signal, and I'm far from convinced getting broadband or the house is such a good thing. Maybe though I'm just jealous that it's faster in that little green valley than here, 3 or 4 densely-wired miles from the buzzing centre of London.

Focus seemed no less busy than last year, but proved a lot more enjoyable. Being a “pod guru” (babe, Sean?) and resolving individuals' specific questions is a lot more rewarding (reassuring?) and less stressful than demonstrating to a crowd and hoping, praying they are indeed interested in black and white conversion technique. And one of the best things about these events is putting a face to a name you've only met online - a pleasure tempered by one's failing to recognise people standing right in front of you (sorry to Duncan and anyone else I blanked). Believe me, I am a serial offender! And while on the subject of forgetfulness, when you're hours away from heading another 150 miles away from home, is there a better place to realise you've forgotten the chargers for your camera batteries than in the middle of a show? I could just imagine the scornful look on John Gravett's face had I turned up at Lakeland Photographic Holidays begging for help (again). I might have been better spending my time walking, or testing local ales. Come to think of it….

As it is, having the internet in the house does have its value. Sure, it does help to have a history degree up your sleeve when some walkers mistake you for a local who might know when these dry stone walls were built. So it's not just BS when, as well as recommending WG Hoskins' classic The Making of the English Landscape, you guess they must date from the enclosure movement, so 16-17th century. But it's nice to bump into them again later and have a bit of web-based knowledge backing up your hunch. After all, in these days when all knowledge is out there, when was the last time someone asked you about something factual, and you didn't ask yourself why they didn't look it up for themselves?

I've been playing around for a while with the Google Maps API for Flash, but I usually need a practical application before I stop grumbling and knuckle down to learn something. Well, with this being the summer of the “staycation”, I've passed on my Lake District pub recommendations more than a few times this year. And there of course bubbled an idea.

So to celebrate the hot-off-the-press 3D maps component, here are my “A List” pubs in a heady, hoppy brew of SQL, PHP, XML, AS3, and ESB:

There are two shortcut buttons which fly you to London or the Lake District, and you can click the pints for more info on each place. Now I wonder if I can get something like this working in Lightroom….

Anyway, that will have to wait. I'm almost finished with book no. 7, just a page or two to go now. A pint awaits.

This picture reminds me of a Cartier Bresson image - which of course I can't find when I want it - but it's actually from Dave Thomas' fine 1969-70 series on the Appleby Horse Fair, an annual event up in the Lake District:

The Romany horse fair at Appleby is the largest and most important in the history of travellers' gatherings in England, dating back to 1685, when James II granted a charter granting the right to hold one there, on a site “near to the River Eden”. Since that time, in the month of June, travellers have converged on Appleby, not just from England, but from Scotland, Wales and Ireland too. They gather in caravans and vardos on Fair Hill, to celebrate their history, music, folklore and family relationships, but most importantly to trade and barter in livestock.

The relationship with the townspeople of Appleby has always been ambiguous. On the one hand the travellers are welcomed for the commercial revenue they bring, on the other they are regarded as some sort of alien invasion. The meeting grounds between settled and nomadic cultures have often provided points of friction, but contemporary materialism seems to heighten the sense of dislocation. The love of hunting, the closeness to nature, the breeding of horses and dogs also form part of a rich tradition that seems increasingly alienated from mainstream culture.

The horse fair still happens every June (official site) and is just a short drive from where I stay. In fact, it starts later this week….

After the four hectic days of Focus, waking up in the Lake District the following morning was the most perfect antidote. Silence, at least until the first tractor rumbled past or the dogs starting barking. No NEC car parks, just hills. And no psyching yourself up to give a presentation or to figure out what direction the next question would come from (and hope it wasn't about Elements). Just get your boots on and head out.

That first day I headed straight up Castle Crag. It overlooks the village and simply demands to be ticked off each time I'm there, and that morning the contrast with the crowded Focus show couldn't be more stark - there wasn't a single photographer anywhere. In fact, unusually for any Wainwright walk, I didn't see anyone, camera-encumbered or not, either on the way up or coming down. Heavenly though that can be, there was a reason - the weather was pretty dreary.

It wasn't that I wanted endless sun and blue skies - in which case the northern and western parts of the British Isles at the end of February would have been somewhat counter-factual. It's the changing light that makes the area so wonderful for photographers, but the weather's got to want to change, and for a week it very stubbornly didn't.

When it did, though, it snowed overnight and then was sunny the following morning - perfect. This is part of the old quarry at Rigg Head, about 1500 ft above the village, though sadly the sheep and their footprints had been there before me. Although I was playing - rather unenthusiastically - with HDR throughout the trip, this is actually a single exposure (that's the D700's dynamic range for you) with fill light from a single off-camera flash.

Simon Roberts’ post Tomorrow We Enter Paradise features a series of photographs by Cumbria-based photographer Stuart Parker who saw some young Asian men in the Lake District and was reminded of police surveillance images of a similar group which were used in court when Mohammed Hamid and others were convicted of terrorist acts. Parker started photographing the locations, and other Lakeland scenes, and building up a series of allusions to Islamist murders in London and elsewhere.

What makes the post interesting for me is that I’ve blogged before about how I had photographed Hamid at London’s Speakers Corner. This spot is as redolent of English tradition – free speech, political and religious liberty – as the Lakes are evocative of Wordsworth, cream teas and another, somewhat twee form of Englishness.

So then, does my series of Speakers Corner photographs constitute, to paraphrase Parker, “actual and metaphorical links between Hyde Park, Iraq and Afghanistan”?  Do Parker’s images really allude to our supposed whole or partial guilt for murder, or merely tell of certain bloodthirsty, bigoted individuals’ inability to appreciate the beauty of the country they are lucky enough to live in?

Landscape photographer Nick Green (also here) has the good fortune to live in the Lake District but backs it up with what seems a detailed knowledge of the region's more obscure corners. Everything's from Wherethefuckisthatdale, and while there is an Ullswater boathouse, I don't think there's one photograph of Ashness Bridge, Keswick landing stages, or Derwentwater's jetties (though that may be because his Northern Fells gallery isn't working). Two dogs provide even more excuse to get outdoors with the camera and are ready-made props, so maybe there should be a new saying, “photographing two dogs with the same stone”. It's usually one near Helton Fell, wherever that may be.

It's too easy to make the Lake District look green and pretty, but Nick's style is darker - even his sunsets are set against brooding, stormy skies. Particularly interesting is his use, unusual for landscape photography, of off-camera flash. At first you think he's been lucky to catch a shaft of light which has fallen on the fence post, rocks or sign in the foreground, or else it's as if the gate or wall is lit by car headlights to create a more furtive appearance. “Lakeland Noir“?

A nice touch is his new Lakes Photographer's Toolkit.

Just doing a little research for my next trip to the Lake District (at Christmas), I came across Martin Lawrence's site which has lots of images from the area. He generously includes notes on where pictures were taken and how to reach the locations, and his photographic locations around Keswick gave me a couple of ideas. This view is a short walk from a gateway I must have driven past dozens of times and wondered where it led.

That's one Christmas walk sorted.

Although Sunday’s annual Borrowdale Shepherd’s Meet had been cancelled, I knew the fell run was still happening. A book I’d been given last Christmas contained Patrick Ward‘s great wide-angle photo of the nearby Wasdale fell run, and I wanted to exploit the combination of the D700 and my 17-35mm f2.8 lens in a similar way. Wide angle shooting is the D700′s biggest plus for me so far (funny how easily you can forget what wide really means).

These blokes, some young and others in their 70s, race up to the top of Borrowdale‘s 750m / 2500ft Dale Head fell and the fastest ones are back in Rosthwaite village in just about 45 minutes. A “fell”, if you’re wondering is the Lake District word for the hills, and is of Norwegian Viking origin. So, like the word “dale” for a valley or “thwaite” for a clearing, the names reveal the region’s settlement history – nearby Keswick’s kaese is from the Norse for cheese and the wick indicating a farm.

I already knew the route and chose a spot just above a gate where I knew the runners would have to pass – it took us 45 minutes to get up there – and where I would be able to scoop up the runners and the valley.

The previous day, at a Sealed Knot battle, I had played with the D700′s focus tracking, leaving the focus mode on Continuous and the focus area on Auto – “the camera automatically detects the subject”, says the manual. The D200 had a similar feature which I never found very effective, but during the battle I let the D700 identify a fast-moving subject and track it across the frame. It was one of those bloody hell, it’s really doing it, road-to-Damascus moments. So I decided to try it for real with the fell run, and it worked like a dream, snapping focus onto the runner and tracking him perfectly. Previously I would have worked in 3 phases – focus, recompose, shoot – but now the camera was allowing me to compose and shoot when the subject had reached where I wanted him to be in the frame. As a result, I got loads of these shots of the runners on the way up and then leaping over a gully on the way down.

Another D700 aspect is that I think the camera has an Auto ISO mode somewhere. If so, I didn’t use it, and these pictures were mostly taken at ISO 800, with some at 400, and others at 500 or 640. In other words I was always thinking about the ISO as well as the aperture/shutter speed combination for enough depth of field to show where they were running while also freezing the action (in this case generally f7.1 and speeds over 1/500). Just as the D700 handled the focussing and let me concentrate on composition and timing my shot, the quality of the D700′s higher ISO captures make me wonder if I should have chosen Auto ISO and eliminated one leg of the ISO/aperture/speed triangle. Scary perhaps, but certainly not absurd.

As an experiment, I’m displaying the pictures here using SlideShowPro. As usual, they were processed in Lightroom and I then used File > Export and the Lightroom to SlideShowPro Director plug-in to upload them directly to a new SSP Director album. The beauty of this solution is that it’s quick, a few clicks, and I can use the images for multiple purposes – SSP Director holds the images at full size and generates the output size on demand. Here I display the pictures in this post, inserting an IFRAME with a web page which calls up that album in a Flash movie (that page is PHP and accepts the album code as a variable). Alternatively, SSP Director could supply different-sized images for my existing web galleries and also for my Flash site. If my Flash site scaled images to fit the user’s screen size, SSP Director would automatically handle that for me, caching the pictures on the server via ImageMagick or GD. Hopefully that’s an interesting detail – at least for some of this blog’s readers! In short, it’s a very efficient Lightroom-web workflow and not as complex as it might sound.

And after that rant on hierarchical keywords, my Nikon D700 and I are disappearing to the said Lake District for a week or so. A Sealed Knot re-enactment at Chirk Castle in N Wales is vaguely on the way, so tomorrow will be its first proper outing. I did some some test shots from ISO 400 up to 25600 and felt the picture held together at least as far as 4000, so I'm going to whack the ISO up and see the results. I don't feel the loss of the 1.6x crop factor will be too big a worry, and it's easily outweighed by my 17-35mm becoming spectacularly wideangle again. That will obviously be great with close action and then with the Lake District landscape. The other nice detail I've already noticed is the Virtual Horizon, like a spirit level on the LCD panel.

I had planned to get to Sunday's annual Borrowdale Shepherds Meet which is held in the village where I stay. I'm sure I would have found some great subjects, and you never know, it might have brought out my hitherto dormant interest in sheepdog trials, shearing, and Cumbrian wrestling. Hm. But that's been cancelled - apparently, in one of the rainiest places in England, there has been too much rain….

Now what were the points I made yesterday? Well, this is an HDR image showing the Castelrigg stone circle near Keswick, Cumbria.

Preparing it made me check how many frames I shot in the Lake District were intended for multiframe applications, in particular for HDR and panorama. The answer - 20% - was surprisingly high but illustrates how easy I think it now is to do this.

It also illustrates my point about the need for types of stacks if this feature is to help us with the multiframe work as well as best-of-burst identification. Looking for a picture in Lightroom's Library grid, I only knew the stack was intended as HDR because it was incredibly underexposed (said without irony - I would have deleted it earlier if the underexposure had been accidental).

Got back from the Lake District last night. I was staying in the village of Rosthwaite where my brother and his wife have bought a holiday house and it’s great to report that this little country still has places with no internet, no mobile phone coverage, and almost no radio reception. So nothing else to do except go walking and snapping – this is Derwentwater from Friars Crag, Keswick and is stitched in Photoshop CS3 from 9 originals. But before I disappear to Lausanne for a couple of weeks, another rant….

Improved stitching is one of the top reasons I offer when people ask about upgrading to CS3 (the other is the black and white adjustment) and I’ve certainly been doing many more panoramas in the last year. But managing all these component images is going to need some work. One way is to use Lightroom’s stacking feature – I’d put the stitched image at the top of the stack. But I file my derivatives separately from the original raw files, and stacking is only really helpful once you’ve actually stitched the final masterpiece. Before that point, the stack will only be represented by one of the panorama’s component shots, and there’s also the danger of accidentally deleting one of these badly-composed components. The same argument applies to other multi frame techniques like HDR or the newer idea of registering multiple frames and using median blending to eliminate anything moving through the scene. As these methods become more popular, we’re going to need more help grouping, representing, and protecting the component images.

Right now, what I do is use a custom field in iView and record the first file’s name against each component and the derivative. I can cope, but I’d like to see better.

What I’d love to see is Lightroom, xMedia, Aperture etc introduce “stack types”. Currently we only have the “best of” method which you see in Lightroom and Aperture and where one image is chosen as the best or representative thumbnail. I’d also like to see “strip” where the representative thumbnail is a line of small thumbnails, showing you that this stack is a series of components for a panorama. Another would be “grid”, for stitches in more than one direction. “Blend” would be another type, where the thumbnail might have a gap across the middle to indicate the components are part of an HDR. I’m even less sure about the representative thumbnail for register blends, but by now I hope you see the direction I’d like software to follow – make the stack’s representative thumbnail indicate what type of usage is intended for the component images.

As well as grouping and representing, another need is adding a greater level of protection against deletion. This is less relevant for “best of” stacks, but for other stack types the user should be warned before a component is deleted. After all, a panorama without one of the component frames would be a rather toothless creature, don’t you think?

In Lightroom Journal, Adobe developer Eric Scouten shows a Mac-limited application that accesses a GPS device's log file and writes the metadata to raw files.

That's a coincidence. I've had a Garmin Foretrex 101 for a month or two and had previously failed to get it to talk to my D200 (method here and using the GXGND2 cable), but I'm off to the Lake District next week and for two weeks in Switzerland soon afterwards, so a couple of days ago I had another go at setting them up. And of course, the solution was as high tech as pushing in a cable a little bit harder - doh - and so yesterday morning I tried it out in Nunhead cemetery. It wrote stunningly-precise locations directly into my raw files' EXIF, but at the end of my walk the unit must have powered down and a couple of pictures had no coordinates.

I don't plan to get anal about GPS, and I don't want to buy Garmin's serial connector (!) to connect the device to my PC or their serial-USB converter for my Mac laptop. But I am curious enough to have spent a chunk of yesterday evening investigating how to complete the missing info from a log file. After all, surely one could write the track log, which is just xml, in Notepad? Not quite finished yet, but I was using ImageIngesterPro - specifically its forthcoming 2.3 which is in late beta. IIP does a whole lot more than write GPS (via exiftool) and the application is cross platform.

Apart from Eric's post, I recently read two articles about drag and drop from Lightroom, which Adobe haven't implemented on Windows. It might be a good idea for Adobe and other Lightroom writers to take a self-denying ordinance not to write about platform-limited solutions, or at the very least to complain rather than apologise (feebly) for doing so. Adobe should be providing an identical experience for most of their users, not just those on the Mac, so if a feature doesn't work on both platforms, shouldn't they disable it on both? That would put the pressure on, don't you think?

Saga Photography is the site of Sandra Schaenzer and Gerhard Schoening, a German couple who:

… spend our spare time experiencing the World's nature and landscapes, trying to capture their beauty in our photographs. We are fascinated by the wonders of this planet but the ongoing destruction of nature and wildlife habitats is distressing and leaves us with concerns about the future.
Being 'Slow Travellers', we take the time we need to experience a landscape, an animal or a plant. Thus we look into a subject thoroughly and would like to inspire you through our photographs for nature and wildlife as well as make you marvel at its variety.

I particularly like the shots of Iceland and volcanoes in Indonesia but we also share a lot of favourite places such as the Lake District and stone circles.