A look back at 2023

It’s that point, just after Christmas, with little opportunity remaining to get out with the camera before the end of the year and with the weather hammering at the window I task myself with sifting through my work over the last twelve months and prising out from it 12 favourites from the year. It’s been a bit of an odd one. We somehow managed to fit in a fair number of trips this year. On the one hand very stimulating but on the other something of an interference in terms of camera work, but it’s always a welcome distraction to point it at something other than the Peak District – as entrancing and beautiful as it is. In between I have actually found little opportunity to engage in a seriously considered study of the landscape but then there has also been an awful lot of of excellent walking, which invariably leads to the discovery of new compositions and views that can be returned to later and captured at a more leisurely pace when the conditions are perhaps more suitable to the subject matter, so it’s all a part of a wider activity of study of the landscape, and to be fair walking new places and studying new views has always been a part of what I do anyway.

So what have I got this time

January – Wardlow Hay Cop

This is taken on one of our regular walking routes from home, around into Hay Dale and then back over to Cressbrook Dale via Wardlow Hay Cop, which is part of the Cressbrook Dale National Nature Reserve. The slopes of Hey Cop are scattered with lovely, characterful Hawthorn trees and the frosty light on this afternoon was a delight, with the backdrop of the clouds on Longstone lending some lovely depth to the shot.

February – Headstones Viaduct

The old boating pool in Monsal Dale backs up from the weir to just in front of Headstones Viaduct and while much of it has now silted up it still offers up a beautiful reflection of two of the main arches of it’s span.

March – Lunch Lane Drifts

In March we had a few days of proper snow, which closed the roads around here for a while. That in itself is always a fun situation (if you’re not in desperate need of the emergency services) and a great excuse to get out on foot with the camera. When it gets windy the dry stone walls snag the snow like this and it builds up nicely in the lanes, between the walls, often with some fabulous wind-carving. If you’re lucky enough to bag a bit of nice light while you’re out then capturing scenes like this is a joy.

April – Flooded forest

A walk through water-cum-jolly dale for this shot, where the willows that have taken root in the silt bar down the centre of the river have been inundated by the high water level in the river. The result is a shot that is more reminiscent of a mangrove swamp.

May – Tokyo International Forum

Japan is a photographer’s dream. There is simply so much to photograph, particularly given the Japanese love of gardens and gardening. The whole country is almost like a work of art and a joy to explore. I came home with hundreds of photographs but this is the one that I am most pleased with. It is taken from the viewing balcony level in the Tokyo International Forum. There is always a caveat when taking photographs of architecture because what you are taking a photograph of is someone else’s art. It’s unwise to ever claim that a photograph of a building like this has any originality because who’s to say that you are not merely seeing the structure in the manner that its designer intended? Great photographs of buildings first require great buildings. Great buildings require great architects and Japan has some great architects.

June – Chrome Hill

When we got back from Japan it was very suddenly spring and stuff was happening. It’s always great to bag a few shots of the May blossom and this little tree on the flank of Parkhouse Hill is a bit of a favourite. The position of the sun was a little tricky but with a bit of good technique I was able to take this lovely shot.

July – Outer Limits

For some reason July was a bit of a damp squib with the camera. The weather wasn’t brilliant and I had a lot to do so really I had to be content with some evening walks in the locality but when your local landscape delivers up something like this does it really matter that you don’t get the opportunity to get out further ? No.

August – Burbage Quarries

I do like Burbage in August. It has a really good mixture of colours. The heather – of course – but also bilberry, which gives you a lovely acid green counterpoint to the warm purpley hues of the heather. Then there’s the warm evening light, which softens the prospect to a lovely pastely fuzziness that you don’t really find at other times of year – a bit like the midge that accompanies it !

September – Arran Sandstone

We had a great trip to Scotland in September, which again yielded dozens of candidate images for this year’s blog but I’m going with this shot that I took on Arran’s norther shore which features a huge outcrop of old red sandstone. The shot was originally made in colour and that offered up a great temperature contrast between the warm red of the sandstone in the foreground and the cold of a blue, evening sky behind but when I popped it into a yellow filter conversion it took on a new dynamic that I hadn’t expected. With the image now in balanced in black and white the mirrored complimentary forms of the clouds and the foregound rocks become much more apparent.

October – water-cum-jolly (again)

I don’t often return to the same location in the same blog but this was a very interesting intersection of angles that was totally unplanned and demonstrates the value of simply going out for a walk to see what you might see. It’s such a complex yet simple shot which took about 5 seconds to create.

November – Ravensdale

It’s now November when the best colours come out in the Peak District and it has been for about 10 years now. The Beech in particular doesn’t really get going until the end of October and this year Ravensdale put on a great show with the colours hanging around for a good 2-3 weeks. This shot is taken looking through beech tree with the other trees in the dale filling the apertures created by the foreground tree.

December – Cressbrook Dale

Staying local again, with the snow making it impossible to get out of the village but offering the chance to venture out on foot to see what the often-overlooked local landscape has to offer the shot-hungry photographer. I mentioned during my lockdown blogs how being forced to study in detail a landscape that is often overlooked in favour of the apparently more dramatic lands further afield is an excellent education. You realise that the composition rules that you derive from those other studies work just as well when you are down here in the hedges in your own back yard.

In summary…

Anyway, there they are. A small selection of my favourites from the year. There’s always more in my social media channels should you be interested. I know it’s been yet another difficult year for a lot of people. We are surrounded by so many uncertainties at the moment. Remember – practicing photography generates Dopamine. Dopamine and Cortisol cannot co-exist so if you go out and take photographs you reduce the amount of Cortisol in your body and heal yourself. It won’t cure the world’s ills but it will at least offer you a little bit more protection.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my work. It’s always appreciated.

2022 in review

Well, that’s the end of 2022, then, although the year-end is not really bringing the curtain down on certain things, is it ? We’ve spoken to a lot of people this year who have found it hard to get into the festive spirit. There’s just a bit too much rubbish going on to really feel like we’re in control.

We’ve had plenty of distractions here in our beautiful corner of the Peak District as well. If you haven’t seen www.savecressbrookdale.com yet then have a mooch. The matter has occupied us for the entire second half of the year. The coming year is a bit of an unknown but it’s not something that is going to be resolved anytime soon and is too important to ignore. The distraction means that I haven’t done any painting this year, sadly, and I also lost a very dear friend who was both a lovely human being and a fantastic artist. I can only hope that I can use the disturbance of her loss as a trigger to get me into the studio, if only because I know it’s what she would have wanted me to do.

It’s been an interesting year with the camera, though. In June I sold some old SLR equipment and invested in an iPhone 13 Pro, which on the whole is a remarkable device. The only disappointment was the 77mm camera, which only has a 6mp sensor behind it. It’s my fault for not doing my research properly. I should have bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max, whose 68mm camera has a 12mp sensor. It was a mistake to assume that the latest device would prove to be the best piece of kit. It means that I have spent the year using two iPhones as my old but still highly capable 8 Plus has a 12mp sensor behind the 58mm camera. I have some plans for new techniques that I’ll share if and when they produce useful results.

On the with this year’s choice of images ……

January

We’ve tried very hard to get back into our pre-covid level of walking this year and we had a lovely outing in January from Peak Forest that took in a part of the Great Ridge. I had wanted to use this particular prospect of Mam Tor from Lord’s Seat to test out a new lens. Sadly the lens – like a lot of lenses, to be fair – turned out be junk so this image taken with the 58mm camera on the 8 Plus was preferred.

As a general rule you will always find that the native cameras provide a better quality shot without additional lens converters. There are exceptions and they’re worth doing the research for as they provide options on focal lngths and thus angular seperation.

February

A lovely, sunny wander around the Yorkshire Sculpture Park yielded this shot, which is of a sculpture called Seated Figure by Sean Henry ( … https://ysp.org.uk/art-outdoors/seated-figure ). I’m always wary of taking photographs of other people’s art, including architecture. Putting Jane in the shot creates an alternate context to the original vision.

If you’ve never been to YSP then I urge you to go and have a look. Such a lovely place ( …with an excellent cafe ). We’ll be back again next to see the new exhibitions.

March

Another one from one of our regular walks. This time it was a lovely day’s walk around Combs in the west of the Peak District. We started just behind the White Hall Centre and followed the western edge of Combs moss all the way to the village of Combs and then back along Ladder Hill and Wythen Lache. This shot is taken from the edge of Combs Moss – a lovely, quiet but spectacular walk.

April

Of course April means chasing bluebells, although every year is different. This shot is from one of the locations that I look at every year over in Coumbs Wood, which is near Lea. It often gets overlooked because the nearby Bow Wood is much better known for its bluebells but – don’t tell everyone – Coumbs is the much, much better location.

May

We had a lovely few days away in the Yorkshire Dales in May, not too far away from Pen-Y-Ghent. While some parts of the Dales are very reminiscent of parts of the Peak District there are many others that feel very other-worldly and the tops of the high moors around the Three Peaks, between Wharfdale and Horton, definitely has that unique Dales feel to it. It was while out scouting for the location used by David Bellamy (artist, not botanist) when he painted Dale Head Farm with Pen-y-Ghent behind it that I found this composition.

June

Midsummer on Lunch lane.

As I mentioned earlier, I traded in some redundant SLR equipment and invested in an iPhone 13 Pro, the photographic capabilities of which are quite extraordinary. One of the things about it that I really wasn’t sure about beforehand was the ultra-wide, 16mm camera. It’s not a focal length that I have ever worked with before so I really didn’t know much about it but I have to say that I am absolutely sold on it. Photographers use focal length to manage something called the Figure:Ground Ratio. What 16mm does is create compositional figures that are close to the camera in a way that the mind cannot imagine. We can usually visualise longer focal lengths because they’re just crops of the world that we see around us. Not so with focal lengths that are wider than what the eye sees. The 16mm camera is a genuinely useful focal length to work with.

July

Midsummer is always a good time to explore Ramshaw Rocks. The late sun lights it in a lovely oblique way that is almost 90 degrees to the line of the ridge. There are many interesting shots.

August

A trip up onto Hathersage Moor and shot of Higger Tor from Carl Wark. It had been quite wet for a few days and – of course – we had an absolute scorcher of a week shortly before. I was a little bit worried that everything had got a bit too scorched at a critical time for the heather but the few days of damp had helped everything to recover well. As always I had hoped in vain to get the place to myself but I was still surprised to find 7 or 8 people already there with cameras.

September

Another lovely trip up to the Galloway coast, which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places. The landscape between Creetown and Southerness is stunning. This is a shot of Ardwall Island, which is near Knockbrex. Again, the 16mm ultra-wide creating a scene that is very difficult to envision while standing looking at it through 26mm eyes..

October

The autumn colours came in very slowly this year, with a lot of soft growth having been already killed-off by the excessive temperatures earlier in the year. It was particularly tricky finding the more colourful bracken as a lot of it quickly turned brown as the year cooled. This lovely patch was in Hay Dale, just around the corner from home.

November

It’s always pleasing to go to a place that is very farmiliar and create a shot that you’ve never done before. This bridge is not far from the Visitor Centre at Fairholmes in the Upper Derwent. It’s a place that I know very well and use regularly in workshops simply because there are so many options in such a compact area. I have been looking at this little stretch of water for a couple of years and finally found the time to fight a way through the undergrowth to look at it in a bit more detail. I’m very glad I did.

December

Although everyone got a cold snap in December we didn’t really get that much in the way of snow around here at all. Just a few flurries, which quickly went away in the valley bottoms and only really hung around for any time on the tops of the moors. In fact we haven’t had any significant snow here since last November. I was very glad that it did hang around long enough for me to get a lovely set of shots from around Hathersage Moor, above Surprise View. It’s hard to pick one but this one taken near Over Owler Tor is reminiscent of a forzen exo planet somewhere near the galactic core, so that’ll do for me!

So there we are. Just a few shots from many hundreds. It’s always difficult to choose but fun nonetheless. Here’s hoping for some serious improvements all ’round in the new year so stay warm and safe and look after each other. And take more photographs.

2023 Peak District Landscapes Calendar

I’m very happy to once again be offering a calendar full of scenes from the Peak District to hang on your wall and make you smile. Here is the selection of images that I have chosen for this year’s offering. There are more details on my web site about ordering …

2021 – In review

It seems just a bit weird and just a little bit sad to be sitting typing another annual lookback that contains a significant amount of lockdown material made more poignant by the very sad loss this year of a couple of people close to us. Of course we’re all in a much better position this year than we were last year when we were only just starting to get suggestions of viable vaccines. By the middle of the summer a lot of us had received two shots and I was out teaching photography again. Something that was inconceivable 12 months ago when we barely left the garden. And we have had yet more bizarre weather, with winter stretching all the way into April and early May, despite yet again having had a bizarre warm patch in March. A lot of the plants in our garden that got off to a cracking start were scorched by the severe frosts of April.

As it was for a lot of folk, I am sure, the garden was a real place of comfort this year and we got a lot of work done. We also did a huge amount of walking, with further exploration of the local lanes providing a lot of welcome distraction. I’ve also spent a lot of time pushing my painting forward. I’m still nowhere near where I want it to be but I’m a lot closer than I was this time last year. And I don’t throw away a fraction as much work as I was doing this time last year. I’m happy to feature some of the better paintings in the blog below.

A highlight for the year for me was running my first smartphone photography-only workshop, which I did on behalf of the good people at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. It was very satisfying to both articulate and put into practice the knowledge and material that I have accumulated over the last three to four years. Smartphones have reached an astounding level of sophistication and while there are some aspects of photography that are still best left to the more expensive and dedicated cameras smartphones are very much fit for purpose for an awful lot of the things that you might like to take photographs of at a tiny fraction of the weight.

There will be more smartphone workshops next year and more experimentation as the devices develop rapidly.

So some pictures and some stories …

January

We do seem to have had an awful lot of snow this year. It’s just as well there has been some nice stuff in between. January’s shot comes from a local walk across the fields toward Litton on a day that despite the bright sun the temperature never got above freezing, so the frost and snow on the trees hung on all day. A lovely day for photography and this tree was just one of the many that caught my eye that day. I have so many photographs from January snow this year and of course it continued into February and beyond.

I also finished a piece that I was very happy with in January – Sunset in the Dane Gap, which is the view from the the Roach End Gap side of the The Roaches toward the Dane Gap, where the River Dane leaves the Peak District and flows out onto the Cheshire Plains.

February

Another snow image, inevitably, for February. We spent a lot of time walking in and around the lanes that split the fields south of Tideswell and where the White Peak Way passes through our corner of the Peak District. As is often the case with these things the snow reveals the landscape in ways that would be otherwise overlooked and this shot is a good example of this.

March

More walks and more snow. This brings home to me just how much snow we had and how cold it was for such a long time. One of our regular routes takes us over Wardlow Hey Cop, which is a magical place. The howling gale that had accompanied this band of snow left these wonderful drifts in the lea of the wall above Cressbrook Dale.

April

My catalogues are curiously bereft of photography in April. I know we were busy with all sorts of things but I have a vague recollection of the weather not being particularly brilliant. I also remember waiting impatiently for the spring flowers to get going but it was so cold that it took an eternity for the Bluebells to arrive and Wild Garlic never actually arrived. Thankfully the passing weather offered enough drama to compensate.

May

Although the month started cold the weather did eventually break and flowers started to come through so thr annual pilgrimage to Ravensdale was in order.

I also manage to complete another painting. This was done in water-mixable oils, which really are a curious beast indeed. A pleasing bit of draughting even if the the colours proved tricky in the unfarmiliar medium.

June

In June we finally managed to take a holiday that we had actually booked for the previous year and it was with some considerable relief that we found ourselves on a stretch of the Cardigan coast that we know well. Significantly I had also taken the leap of upgrading the smartphone that I had been using for photography. I replaced my trusty iPhone 7 with an 8 Plus, which has the advantage of dual lenses. I was stunned by the leap in quality that it offered. So much so that at some point in the near future I will upgrade again to a 12 Pro. June’s shot was taken at midsummer evening on the beach at Tresaith.

I also completed another painting in June. Somewhat contrarily it was a snow scene. As if we hadn’t had enough of the stuff. The result was very pleasing.

July

More time away from the Peaks in July and this time up along the west coast of Scotland. We had the pleasure of spending a few days on Eigg, which proved to be an incredible place. A bit Mordor and a bit Shire, all wrapped into one. This shot of the view over to Rhum was taken on a walk out one afternoon from our accommodation.

August

It was also around this time that I got my second Covid jab so felt more comfortable about getting out and running workshops and the heather this year was excellent … even if the weather wasn’t particularly brilliant. On a day out with Steve we went to Three Shires Head, which is a bit of a favourite of mine for photographing moving water. It was very pretty but I was a little bit shocked to find it in a bit of a state. Apparantly it had been ‘Instagram’d’ and after the end of lockdown last year had been inundated with visitors. The abundance of ‘No Parking’ signs was a testimony to the problems that the flood of visitors had caused. I might not use it again. We’ll see…

September

Back in the Peak District for a lovely, golden September and a busy month of workshops. This month’s shot is the excellent view down into Water-cum-jolly from Brushfield. It’s a shot I have done before.

And another painting. This time on the less-known Peak District location of Wolf Edge. A really lovely place to be on an evening in late summer when the heather is in bloom.

October

October proved to be an incredibly busy month and included the aforementioned workshop on behalf of Buxton musuem, which was very successful on the whole but which also revealed the significant performance gap between iPhones – my preferred platform – and Android-based smartphones. It is very intriguing how divergent the various mobile platforms are when it comes to Photography. It’s quite unlike DSLRs where the same photographic principles can simply be ported between proprietory platforms because at the end of the day they all simulate film SLRs. Smartphone photography can simulate an SLR but increasingly – and divergently – don’t. Interesting times. A shot from a lovely evening on Gardom’s Edge. It’s one that I have done before with an SLR. I struggle to see any difference between that one and this, done with the iPhone 8 Plus.

November

We were all a bit shocked by the early return of the snow in November. I had a chat with one of the local farmers about it and he said that while it had happened before in his lifetime it was very unusual. For three days it was very attractive around here. One of those days was a complete deep freeze, which made walking interesting and then suddenly overnight the snow disappeared completely. All 4 inches of it. Quite strange.

December

I’ve not had a great amount of opportunities to be out with the camera over December. The weather has not really been very good. As I write the wind is wet and gusty outside and the forecast isn’t much better so I’ll finish with the shot up Grainfoot Clough that I took a couple of weeks ago.

So, another curious and unsettling 12 months. The weather forecast is set for it to be 13 degrees celcius here over the New Year, which is something that I find really quite worrying. What does that mean for the coiming 12 months ? Will we be baking in March and knee-deep in snow in June ? Who knows.

Keep safe and look after each other.

2022 Peak District Landscapes Calendar

My 2022 Peak District landscapes calendar is now available to buy from my web site. As before it has been done entirely with an iPhone, a medium which I find wonderfully rewarding, if only because it is so portable and accompanies us on all of our walks. Inevitably the calendar contents have been somewhat affected by the lockdown requirements that we have all been enduring but when the circumstances have permitted I have gone beyond the bounds of the beautiful and immediate vicinity in which we live. I have also kept the costs the same as last year. This year’s images are as follows ….

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The Lockdown Files (Part 2)

At the beginning of November 2020 we entered another lockdown. Just 4 weeks this time. It was a little bit cruel on the photography community because November is rapidly becoming the month with the best autumnal colour and 2020 was no exception to that. Once again I was obliged to look more locally for the colours. The area around Cressbrook is a predominantly Ash woodland like the rest of the Derbyshire Dales Nature Reserve and Ash is not renowned for it’s autumn display. The leaves usually turn a sickly yellow and then fall with the first frost but thankfully there are little nuggets of colour that can be found hiding in among the Ash so November once again revealed the value of enforced study. I found myself examining views previously overlooked or even ignored and exploring deep into parts of the woodland that are rarely trodden and the results were actually very pleasing. Once again all of the work is executed using a smartphone.

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Images taken during the November 2020 Lockdown

2020 In Review

It’s really hard to know where to start with 2020. Do I talk about the weather ? Do I talk about the virus ? Or do I just stick to the photography because you are already far too farmiliar with and perhaps just a bit fed up with the other topics ? Of course it’s never as simple as that because when summing up one’s own artistic contributions to the year, inevitably, they are inextricably linked with the external forces forging the mental architecture within which the work is created.

The virus has made life for everyone difficult. I ran one teaching day this year, just before it all kicked off. Compare and contrast that to the 50 plus workshops in other recent years. It’s been quite profound. Thankfully our garden came to the rescue, as I am sure it did for many other people. We have spent an incredible amount of time moving our precipitous garden forward and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I wasn’t necessarily constrained with the amount of photography that I did but I was constrained in the subject matter. During the tightest restrictions of the pandemic we kept our walks – and thus I kept my photography – as local as possible, which by comparison with the constraints faced by others actually wasn’t that bad really. I have never taken our location for granted and being obliged to spend three months here was a privilege and it gave me chance to study in some detail the local area in a way that I wouldn’t normally get a chance to, simply because I would normally be elsewhere in the Peak District running teaching days. I summarised some of my favourite shots from the first lockdown period in a previous post in my blog to this one, The Lockdown Files.

The early part of the lockdown coincided with some absolutely stunning weather. Several weeks of unseasonally warm weather – I say unseasonally but an early spring warm and dry is becoming alarmingly seasonal. This is not the first annual review where I have described the same sort of event. This year the prolonged drought put paid to any higher level Hawthorn blossom while the spring orchids were also very short-lived. The Bee Orchids were a general no-show again. As a whole this year’s wild flowers have been excellent and the warm early weather created some really lovely autumn colours later in the year. The frosts took a long time to get here and were for the most part extremely limited in their impact until the snow arrived in mid-december.

Photographically I have once again limited myself solely to what can be achieved with an iPhone. Having experienced some technical teething troubles last year this year has been pretty much trouble free, with the only irritating part of the workflow being that my aging PC no longer speaks to my iPhone so transferring images between the two has been a bit tedious and long-winded. I am contemplating buying an iPad to make editing easier. It is perfectly possible to do it all on the iPhone but an iPad would simplify the workflow and improve editing accuracy.

Newhouses In The Snow

I have also made great strides in returning to painting and for the first time in 15 years and have actually managed to complete some works to a level that is acceptable to me. I find myself in a much better place with paint than I was when I left off and I have been working with my good friend Diana Syder to move it forward. I am hoping that I can leave the purely representational work to the camera and bring something a bit more abstract into the work with the paintbrush but I’m really quite a way away from that at present.

So what about the photographs ?

January

Parkhouse Hill from Chrome Hill

One of the things that we set out to do this year was walk a lot more. There are an awful lot of places in the Peak District that we have not visited much in recent years so we set out to do much more of what we used to do 20 or so years ago. One of the walks we did in January was the Upper Dove from Hollinsclough, which inevitably took in Chrome Hill and this classicview looking south toward Parkhouse on a beautiful sunny day is my choice for January.

February

Surprise View Detail

We had a small amount of snow in February so I packed off to the ever-rewarding Surprise View for a bimble among the Silver Birches. This pleasing semi-abstracted view of the snow covered rocks against the blue sky was my pick from the set.

March

Water-cum-Jolly

It was clear from about mid-march that something was going very wrong in the world. Perhaps it was the sense of foreboding that it all came with that caused us to start walking closer to home but a wander through Water-cum-Jolly just below the village produced this shot, which made it into my calendar this year. It has a lovely impressionist feel to it, with the soft mist in the gorge forcing the dark, cold backrgound to recede softly against the warmth of the foreground light.

April

Tulip Interior

By the time we got into April we were well and truly into lockdown but being here when the world seemed to be going to hell in a handcart was a reassuring balm. An insulation from the suffering that an awful lot of people were enduring. We were good and stayed as local as we could and spent an enormous amount of time in the garden. April’s shot is from the garden and it’s the inside of a tulip. If there is one thing that the iPhone does well it’s macro and the Exolens that I have is outstanding. It is probably one of my favourite shots of the year.

May

Ravensdale

Another month where for the most part we felt away from the world’s troubles, although now more people were venturing into our patch. It was hard to not resent the intrusion, especially when we were all supposed to be trying hard to keep the transmission rates down. I took the opportunity to look for compositions in Cressbrook Dale and Ravensdale that I hadn’t made before. One of the pleasing things is the way that in the 20 years we have lived here the bluebells have become stronger and stronger so it was nice to be able to find a shot with bluebells in it when going to other bluebell woods in the Peak District was actually out of the question.

June

Making Silage

The balmy summer evenings of June were spent walking the local area. It’s always great to see the local farmers making silage and it often makes a great photo. It’s the unexpected regular pattern in an otherwise organic scene. Unfortuantely I seem to have mislaid the original frame for June’s shot of silage making. A vicitim of the aforementioned vagaries of getting the iPhone to talk to a PC. It looks OK at 96 dpi and 2000px across, I think but I will seek out the original for some better processing.

July

Despite the fact that we were no longer in lockdown technically in July the tidal wave of visitors to the area kept us local. It was simply unpleasant to venture beyond the locality. The roads were packed and the Peak District honey pots were overwhelmed. Again we felt fortunate to be somewhere like Cressbrook where isolation is not the same hardship being stuck in a flat in the middle of a town is. We can fully imagine how the mental health of people would be suffering so we did our best to just keep out of the way. I’m back in the garden with the macro lens for July’s shot where the Sempervivums this year were magnificent. Their beautiful, delicate flowers and the prehistoric character of the bract stems make them a very rewarding subject.

August

The Great Slab (London Wall) in Millstone Edge Quarry

With the visitor onslaught continuing it was with trepidation that I ventured out for a few evenings in August and it was a trip to one of my favourite locations, Millstone Edge quarry that yielded August’s shot. In the end it was just a simple grab shot looking back at the Great Slab as I moved on to the next spot that really stood out in this set. Such is life 🙂 Always follow your instinct on things visual like this. If your brain has responded to it then there’s probably a photograph there. You just need to find it.

September

Arriving in Brodick

Like a lot of people we finally got away ourselves for a break in September, returning to a favourite spot on the Argyll coast on Loch Caolisport and returning via friends on Arran. This shot is from the morning we got the ferry back to the mainland from Arran, with the ferry pulling into the pier at Brodick on a lovely morning late in the month.

October

The Manifold Valley

The fantastic weather of the earlier part of the year meant that the autumn colours were truly wonderful. We also started walking further away from Cressbrook again, returning one day to a walk we had done around the Manifold Valley earlier in the year. The shot chosen is from that walk and this view from Castern Wood Nature Reserve down into the Manifold near Throwley has always been one of my favourite Peak District views and one of the best that the Peaks has to offer.

November

Cramside Beech

We found ourselves back in a sort of lockdown in November although not a huge number of people seemed to pay any attention to it. As is becoming very common now, the autumn colours stretched long into November and being surrounded by woodland I didn’t have to go very far to find them. This shot is from an area called Cramside, which has become a Woodland Trust nature reserve since we have lived here. I love the way this Beech tree seems to explode from the middle of the frame. I must confess I am still really chuffed with this shot.

December

The Bridge at Fairholmes

Unlike last year we actually had some December snow this year and we got some lovely walks in. There were plenty of other opportunities with the camera, including multiple return visits to the Manifold Valley but it’s this shot of the bridge below Derwent Dam at Fairholmes that makes my list. The walks around Ladybower are often rewarding like this.

So, a testing year for everyone. Some more than others. I hope sincerely that you have escaped the worst of what the year has thrown at us and that the vaccinations arrive sooner rather than later. Some of my older neighbours here in the village have already received theirs, which is excellent news indeed. If nothing else it shows that at least one thing we have been told in this weird year of on-line existence is actually true. Next year it will be more experimental photography projects and more painting. Thank you for being with me this year and I hope sincerely to continue with the entertainment in 2021.

HNY everyone…

The Lockdown Files (Part 1)

There’s no doubt that this has been a curious and often distressing period in our lives. For me Spring is usually a very important time, with lots and lots of photography workshops on the go with people just enjoying being out with their cameras after the long, dark days of winter. But like just about every other landscape photographer out there I have been pretty much sitting on my hands for the last few weeks – except I haven’t. I am lucky to live in a very beautiful place in the Peak District and one which I would not normally have an opportunity to pay close attention to simply because I would be busy. The enforced stay-at-home has been something of an opportunity to slow it all down and give my locale the attention it so clearly deserves so here is a gallery of images made while out walking near my house in the last two of months. All the images here are taken within couple of miles of my house and made using just my smartphone. Some of the shots I have made before and have been very happy to repeat but there’s new ones in here as well. The sorts of discoveries that you only make by dwelling and taking the time to get used to the major stimulae so that you can see and study the minor views, which is often where the greatest discoveries lie  ….

Developing a scene

I thought it might be interesting to step through a 10 minute or so period from Thursday’s workshop where we developed a scene. I’ve also decided to do the entire exercise on my iPhone to see how easy that is (!).

I always advise that when you visit a place that is at first overwhelming in detail and complexity the easiest route to whittling out it’s detail is to go with your gut. If something leaps out at you or exhibits even minor characteristics that set it apart from the jumble of detail around it start with that. Shoot it, study it – most importantly – get used to seeing it. There is a process that the brain goes through called Accommodation whereby it gets used to seeing and stops reacting to things. By focussing your attention on even minor details you start the process of Accommodation and that will help you see past exasperating detail and distil from it shots that work.

Bolehill Quarry is a great place to demonstrate the principle. It is stacked with overwhelming amounts of detail within which hide a huge number of photographs. We arrived toward the end of the day and the sun was already low, cutting colourfully through the trees and picking only occasional sections of the cliff face at the back. We very quickly came across a dramatically lit section that had potential so set about developing it.

First stage – the bit that caught our eye

Strongly and strikingly lit. A close cropped shot drew out just the tones and colours with very few clues offering decode points on the abstraction.

Second stage – chasing the detail out to sides..

The vertical slice we chose clearly had more to in the rock buttresses either side. A horizontal on a slightly shorter focal length pulled that in.

Stage 3 – context

Keeping the central section over a fifth keeps the attention on the bit we saw first but stepping back and switching back to the vertical starts to put what was initially abstract into a context. But we are now starting to pull trees into the composition so

Stage 4 – collecting peripheral detail

Having now accommodated the initial stimulus we now start to see how the detail just beyond it compliments it. Any further back and the figure:ground ratio will not favour us while reverting to horizontal pulls detail in from both sides.

Stage 5 – refinement

A lift of a couple of feet and tilt down just removes the slightly annoying triangle of sky from the top right corner which was clumping with the frame boundary while a deliberate and minor tweak away from vertical corrects the alignment of the right hand tree, which now appears consistent with the right hand side of the frame,

The result is complex and satisfying but it had to start by abstracting that initial detail so we could get used to seeing it, allowing us to later see how it worked in context.

And the iPhone seems to have done OK. The mobile interface to WordPress isn’t bad at all 😊

2019 In Review

I’m sitting here wondering whether there was a time in recent memory when we got to the end of the year without having had any snow for the current winter and to be honest I’m struggling to think of one. There has been virtually no lying here in Cressbrook so far this winter. We’ve had some sleet but that’s about it. It’s all a bit strange to be honest. Perhaps the New Year will make up for it !

Another very interesting – and at times frustrating – year with the camera. As most people will have gathered by now, I have eschewed conventional digital photography almost completely and have spent the entire year working with an iPhone, which has had it’s ups and downs. Some of the ups have come in the discovery of apps and gizmos that do amazing things. Tremendous investments of imagination for really very little money at all. Also the fact that the principles that one applies to and teaches about conventional photography port almost in their entirety to the iPhone is very satisfying while the discovery that there are some things that the iPhone does better than a conventional camera just makes me laugh out loud at times. The downsides are that I made some pretty fundamental assumptions about what I should be doing with it which proved to be completely wrong. Things that had I been a better student I might have discovered earlier but because of the somewhat blinkered and introverted approach that I sometimes take to things I overlooked and which consquently had a serious negative imapact on what I was trying to do. I got there in the end, however, and now have every confidence that I can do just about everything I want to do with a smartphone – expect perhaps photograph wildlife, which is something that it really doesn’t lend itself to at all.

So, what about the actual photographs ?….

January – Bolehill Quarry Detail

This is a shot that I have done with an SLR. I have included it in here because it’s nice have a side-by-side comparator that validates much of what I have been trying to say about smartphone photography. It’s also one of my favourite scenes from Bolehill.

February – The Upper Derwent

There is a section of the Derwent that is above Kings Tree but below Slippery Stones that I have been investigating off and on for a few years now. It tends to get overlooked because it’s a bit of a stroll down off the track and is hidden for much of it’s length. But when you take the time to pop down there and have a look at it you realise that the scene you are presented with could easily be from somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. A really satisfying find.

March – Acireale Festival

In March we went to Sicily, which was tremendously interesting as well as being a whole lot warmer that the UK ! Our visit coincided with the Acireale Festival which was just a few kilometers down the road from where we were staying. It was a stunning visual feast. Almost impossible to describe and I have way too many photographs of it to share here so I have picked just one for the sake of the blog. If you ever get the chance to go then just get there. It’s amazing.

April – Carrick Shore

To be fair we had a lot of holidays in 2019. It was a lot of fun. In April we spent a few days in Galloway at a place called Carrick Shore and while it wasn’t a photographic holiday it’s very hard to go somewhere beautiful like this and to not take photographs so this one is from one lovely evening and was taken just down from where we were staying. The island in the background is called Ardwall Island. It’s a bit of a well-kept secret this place and well worth searching out if you have a mind to explore the Borders area of Scotland rather than whizz straight up to the Highlands

May – Silage Making near Monyash

Taken on an evening’s drive out, looking for Hawthorn blossom but found this one instead. Nicely unplanned and a scene I have driven past dozens of times before and even photographed before. This time it was just a magical combination of light and dramatic colour created by the newly cut field.

June – The Harbour at John O’Groats

Another holiday (!) and this time it was a trip around the North Coast 500 for our 20th wedding anniversary. We spent midsummer at John O’Groats, which actually has an awful lot more going for it than most people would have you believe. The coastline is wonderful and we had the curious experience of it not really getting dark, as such. The sun would go down at 11:00pm and then pop up again at 3:00am, making sleep virtually impossible. Exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. This shot is taken in the harbour at about 10:00pm. It is particularly pleasing.

July – Roach End Farm

This is one of those photographs that I have had in mind for years and have attempted before, unsuccessfully, but which the iPhone reduced to ridiculous simplicity. The position of the tree and the focal length required to produce the required angle of view that would make the tree big enough to behave as an active figure in the frame meant that the camera actually had to be about 8ft off the ground. Enter the selfie-stick !! Click. Boom. Job done. I laughed all the way home 😀

August – Hereford Cathedral

It was about August time that the aforementioned technical errors that I had been making started to dawn on me. Without going into detail it meant that I had been working under erroneous assumptions about some aspects of iPhone photography for about a year and it had a significant negative impact on my work. Ho hum. These things happen, I suppose and while I am frustrated with what happened I am also reassured that I am now in a better place and have adjusted my tools and techniques to accommodate the new knowledge.

The heather was rubbish this year so here’s a shot of Hereford Cathedral from a walk we did.

September – Lathkill Dale Detail

A pleasingly surreal detail shot from fishponds section of the Dale. If you know the location then you can probably see the shot straight away but if you don’t then the decode delay should produce a pleasing affect in the brain.

October – Rain Over Ben Cruachan

Another holiday ! A few lovely days staying on Loch Awe side. For the most part the weather was really nice and the light gorgeous. Being there when the landscape did this was a true privilege.

November – Beeches in Hall Dale

The mild weather meant that Autumn stretched and stretched and to be fair I have dozens of potential photographs from both October and November but this one is particularly pleasing because it’s taken in Hall Dale, just around the corner from my house. I have been looking for a shot here for years because the Beech trees are lovely and it seems that I had simply been going there at the wrong time of day all this while. Who knew, eh ?

December – Monsal Head

I really haven’t done much with the camera at all this month. To be fair I have been mainly painting, about which I hope to speak more next year some time when I have something to show. For now I’m just really pushing paint around and trying to remember how it all works. So the only shot I really have to show for the month is the one I took at Monsal Head. The irony is that it is probably the best shot I have taken of the location despite it being a mile from my house.

So the end of another year of photography and despite the ups and downs it has been really interesting. I have more iPhone projects in the pipeline for next year as well as more film and more painting. I hope there is something in it that I can share with you.

I hope you have had a good one and thank you as always for being there with me this year.