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.

Capturing Clouds

If you ask most people what their idea of a perfect day is, they would invariably cite the fact that there ‘wasn’t a cloud in the sky’. Clear blue skies tend to cheer folks up, well apart from most photographers I know. A cloudless sky is one stripped of an important element, drama. That drama is often supplied by clouds. Whether they are the soft fluffy type, the dark moody type or the mackerel skies. Cloud inversions are even more sought after. That feeling you are floating above the clouds and distant landscapes peek through the clouds or are enveloped by them. Calderdale is a particularly good spot for cloud inversions as the valleys are very steep sided and cloud has a tendency to get trapped in them.

My photography tends to lean on the dark and moody side. I love dramatic atmospheres - mist, cloud, storm, the more oppressive or cloudy, the better. Maybe it's because I haven’t come to grips with shooting in very sunny conditions, or I just don’t use ND filters enough/properly. Maybe it is because it is a reflection of my general mood. I have a dark brooding personality that is best expressed through my photography. From the moment I started to take photography more seriously, I favoured dark, de-saturated images. I thought and indeed still do think, a light blue/grey tone to my photography works better for me. Clouds and cloud inversions really lend themselves to this colour palette.

We do good skies in Yorkshire. We have big landscapes with height and valleys. This can be a problem to capture the grandeur of the landscape but I still try. There sometimes isn’t a foreground, just plenty of middle and background. It is how you present this type of view. I have used 2:1 or 16:9 crops lately to express a sense of scale to my photos. I find it a good way of showing off just how open and uninterrupted the scenery is.

There is a local campaign to stop a proposed windfarm of 65, 200m high wind turbines on the moors between upper Calderdale and the moors above Top Withens near Haworth. This would have a devastating effect on the upland moorland ecosystem as well as drastically affecting the landscape of this area. To say it is overkill is an understatement! We are used to wind turbines in Calderdale but on a smaller scale. Clumps of up to ten moderately sized turbines, can just about sit comfortably with the surroundings but this proposal is huge both in the size of the turbines and the number they wish to put in place. The big skies would be peppered with massive structures, looming like giants over the peat bogs and rocky outcrops. It would be dramatic but rather more in the way Tolkien painted nightmarish visions of the landscape once Isengard fell to Saruman.

I didn't intend this to be a campaigning blog post about the wind farm proposal, it is about why I love clouds.Maybe it is their ethereal qualities, their mystical properties, of how they change the landscape for the better. I am writing this on damp grey Sunday morning. It doesn’t feel very inspirational weather today. The sky is light grey with little or no cloud definition at all. I do try in every light or weather to get photos. I do work for my craft but I just don’t crave clear blue skies any more. Good luck to you if you do and I hope they lift your spirits. Mine aren’t deflated by blue skies but just throw in a few clouds to make them more interesting.