I’ve worked in Finance my whole working life and thought that photography would spare me the need to attend such things as conferences and workshops, little did I know. It’s been a fair while since I attended either a conference or a workshop in my normal working life, mainly due to Covid bit also due to me being a contractor these days I tend to be more project focused.
The Northern Photography Show
This last weekend I had the absolute pleasure to attend the Northern Photography Show, where my good friend and Photography tutor Chris Sale was one of the guest speakers, along with Amy Bateman and Thomas Heaton. For the avid reader you will know that this is the second weekend in a row that I was in the Lake District, feast or famine I hear you say!
The conference was really good and Chris gave a great presentation of his journey from amateur to full time professional photographer. His presentation and talk where a real inspiration, not just for the photographers looking too turn professional, but also the approach he takes to his photography. These sorts of events are great for meeting like minded people and I did meet some great like minded people. Thanks to Chris and Helen for their hospitality, it is really appreciated.
Rydal Water Workshop
Rydal Water is a lovely spot and one that I’ve had the pleasure of walking around on a couple of previous occasions, both were soggy wet days. I woke at 6am on Sunday morning, as I looked out of the window my heart sank, it was raining again. I was driving in convoy with Chris and Julian Baird, who had stayed over night also, and as we drove it got wetter and wetter. As we arrived at Rydal, the rain was still falling but wasn’t so bad that we didn’t venture out.
The Boat House
This workshop was part of a suit of workshops that Chris was running through the autumn. I was one of three photographers booked on the workshop. The first location that we headed to was on the beach on the southern end of Rydal Water. The main focus of this location was the boat house that was on the opposite bank.
The weather brings with it challenges that you don’t have when rain doesn’t fall. This is mainly keeping the camera and filters dry, and involves using a big brolly. It felt sometimes like I needed an extra arm, but I ended up jamming the handle in my coat pocket that at least this anchored one part of the umbrella.
The boat house is a fair way away across the water and therefore it was a longer focal length that was needed for this image. Whilst I did have my 70 to 180mm Tamron f2.8 with me, I used my Sony 24 to 105mm G lens for this series of images. The image above was taken at 83mm, ISO 100 at f11, which all gave me a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds. As you can see in this image we do get some smoothing of the water, without it being to smooth to not look like water. I think the framing of this image works well with the boat house sat in the bottom right “third” and the large group of trees in the left middle “third”. A little processing in Lightroom has brought out some of the autumnal colours that we could see as we stood on the beach.
Rydal Caves
If we had had better weather conditions we would have stopped at a few other locations on the path around Rydal, but given the rain was relentless we headed to the Rydal Caves for some shelter. Whilst the caves look like caves they are actually as a result of the mining that has taken place over the years in this area. Nonetheless, they are impressive looking when you approach them. It was welcome relief to get inside the caves, as at least there was shelter from the rain and we were able to take off our wet coats and dry off a little.
There is an interesting set of challenges posed when trying to photograph inside the caves. Its very dark for a start, and when looking outwards you get the bright light of the sky. Whilst our eyes can cope with this and our brain interprets the light and dark, cameras aren’t as sophisicated as our eyes. This means that along with getting the composition right, multiple images would have to be taken that expose for the dark and the light, with images in between. These are then blended together use the HDR Merge facility in Lightroom to give a better exposed composite image. Traditional Lightroom editing was then applied to the resultant image to give the final result that you see above. Whilst i’m pleased with this image, I do think I’ve got more to learn about the HDR blending technique. All images used in this HDR blend weer taken on my Sony 16 to 35mm G lens, at 16mm.
There were two other fellow photographers on the workshop and they needed their turn getting this images and guidance and advice from Chris. I took my opportunity to take some iPhone 13 Pro Max images which help with framing shots with the main camera. The insides of the caves are all man made of course, during the mining process and subsequently Mother Nature, has played her part too. As is the trend these days members of the public also have added to the look of the inside of the caves.
Whilst it is pretty gloomy inside the caves, there is still the opportunity to get some interesting and different types of images from those I would normally take. The image you see here is reflections of the cave walls in a pool, that’s is inside the caves. What’s interesting for me is that when you look at this scene with the naked eye, its hard to pick out the different colours, and the writing that is on the wall. When I’d framed this up on the back of the camera, I could see the colours. Some small amounts of Lightroom editing have Brough the colours and writing out in greater detail. I like this image. This image was taken with my Sony 24 to 105mm G lens, at 105mm. The shutter speed was 8 seconds at aperture f8.
The Lone Tree
Regular readers will know that I like a good lone tree, indeed I’ve photographed this tree before, but not previously in these murky conditions. We had debated earlier in the morning that if the mist was low lying that we would do the lone tree location first, sop we could get full separation of the tree from the background in the mist. Whilst it was generally misty and murky, it wasn’t low lying enough to allow that effect to be captured.
As you can see from the image the mist was present but was hanging more above the fells than down around the water. Whilst not being perfect for separation in think you can see the mist over the fells does add a little drama to the image. Sadly the water wasn’t as still as I would of liked it, but you can still see the reflection of the tree in the water. I’ve added a hint of a vignette to this image which I think adds to the murky and dramatic feel that was looking for. This image is at 38mm with my 24 to 105mm g Lens, and is 1/25th of a second shutter speed. As is the case with workshops the other participants had to get the shot, so I tried my hand at longer lens images of the tree.
The image above was taken with my Tamron 70 to 180 f2.8 lens, which does allow the scene to be compressed. Much that I appreciate that Rydal Water is home to lots of wildlife, a group of swans decided to take the opportunity to come have a look at the lone tree. I took 4 images of varying different focal lengths but all included the swans, and I decided to crop out them from this image. I like this image mainly because of the mist lying on the forest on the fells behind.
Rydal Grot and Waterfall
This is the part of the workshop that I had not been to before. I had no idea where we would go. We walked back towards the cars and I wondered if Chris was going to cut the workshop short. However, as we approached the cars he just carried on walking up the road beside the Church. In through a gate and few hundred yards later we came across the Grot and Waterfall. Who knew this was here!.
This image was taken from the bridge that sits over the water that you can see running through the image. My tripod was stood on the wall of the bridge and was hard to the right, to ensure that I was able cut out lots of the branches of the tress that are present, to get rid of the distractions on the edges of the frame. These are small leaves and ends of branches but they distract the viewer from what is the main subject, which is the grot and waterfall.
After we wrapped up at this location the workshop came to an end. I thoroughly enjoyed it and as always learned a lot, specifically about taking images ion bad weather. Thanks again to Chris Sale for his sage advice and support throughout the workshop, and indeed across the whole of the two weekends I had in the Lake District.