High Drama!
It was a very windy, blustery, gusty afternoon up on Bridgestones Moor. The sky was stormy but magnificent, The moor, standing 1400ft above sea level, was relatively dry underfoot. I ventured forth with my Canon 6D and 16-35 f4 IS lens to capture some drama. The raw images turned out great but there was something missing in the straight edit of this excellent
There are occasions when you want to capture the scene ‘as is’. Product photography, commercial shoots and such that require the realistic colours and textures of the items you’re shooting. I have done such shoots and they can be satisfying but for me, landscapes are a different beast.
The photographer and YouTuber Martin Castein, mentions in one of his videos about white balance and how it can convey different emotions to a photograph. Landscapes when you’re out in them, invoke certain emotional responses that commercial shoots don’t. Sometimes you want to present an exaggerated vision of the moment captured and the landscape in which you were shooting. High winds and stormy skies can be portrayed in a more dramatic fashion than just actual documenting the scene when you were there. I created a Lightroom preset to edit the raw images and just tweaked exposure and aspect to suit the shot
The Bridestones sit on top of the aforementioned moor, high above Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. They are an outcrop of gritstone moulded and shaped by erosion known as weathering. The indentations, the cracks, the smooth edges have been made by hundreds of thousand of years of exposure to the elements. To those of us living in upper Calderdale, they are an iconic spot and much visited. I have been there many times but interestingly, it is never busy like the famous Cow and Calf rocks above Ilkley. They are in many ways, superior in their location and general wildness in my humble opinion. The high Pennine moorland of Calderdale is vast compared to say Bradford district, although the two run into each other high above the Worth Valley and Bronte country.
I know these types of representations are not to everyone’s taste but I find they convey how I felt at the time of taking the photos. Coming down off the top, I felt truly windswept, as if I’d had some sort of extreme spa treatment. On several shots, I had trouble holding the camera still enough to take them but an increase in shutter speed and a solid camera body helped. One of the many things modern photographers and YouTubers don’t say about full frame DSLR bodies is that their weight and ergonomics are useful at times. Yes, they are heavier than mirrorless cameras but they feel great in the hand and the weight adds stability taking hand held shots. I really don’t get on with tripods, they are a faff and you have to decide on a composition rather than move around quickly to get the better one. I’m loving my return to Canon DSLRs. They are a joy to hold, to use and I love the colours and detail you get out of what is seen as old technology. On commercials shoots, they are a dream because of their rugged reliability. They are also quicker to operate than mirrorless and are instantly ready from when you turn the camera on. The battery life is twice if not more of their mirrorless equivalent which is another advantage when using them commercially.
I hope you like this selection of landscape images and that they convey a little bit of time and place.
