Pendle Hill – Well Almost

I wrote recently on the Fotocom members forum that my new years resolution was to get out more with my camera. In all honesty thats easier said than done at the moment but what i did think in my own mind was that i need to start using my Sony A6600 again. Its lightweight but has great image quality, and there are plenty of images on my website taken on this camera.

We decided that this Sunday just gone we would get out and about again, and we both agreed that a trip in the car with Charlie was the order of the day. A little reserach told us that the village of Downham was close by to Pendle Hill and getting up onto the summit of Pendle Hill has been on our radar for a while. So off we went heading for Downham. It’s not far from Clitheroe and definitely on the foothills of Pendle Hill. We found a car park spot and headed off up the road towards what we thought must be the right way to go, more later.

We followed the road out of the village for a little while but soon got fed up of Charlie barking at the passing cars, so we headed along a public footpath towards a farm that looked like it would take us up towards Pendle Hill. The image above caught my eye as we walked through the farm and out onto the open ground. It was very very muddy underfoot but the tree was lovely looking and i wanted to capture it in the wider landscape. It’s certainly not the worlds best image but it does show off the landscape. We walked maybe 100 yards further through the muddy field and we cam across this next scene.

My first thought when i saw this scene was that the sun would be totally blown out and that the camera wouldnt be able to capture enough detail to make the tree stand out. I did like the shadows of the trees and hoped that the raw image would have enough information to allow me to do a decent edit in Lightroom. I hope you agree with me that this is a decent image and the experiment with taking an image looking directly into the sun was a success.

Trudging through muddy fields can get a bit annoying, why we didn’t think of that beforehand, i don’t know but we didnt. My OS Map App showed me that a road ran back to Downham from the farm up ahead, but we also saw a gate that took us upwards towards higher ground. Once we got through the gate we decided we should follow the public path back towards where we had come from. The image above i took as we walked along the path that was skirted by this lovely dry stone wall. What caught my eye first was the light on the tree which is the subject of the image. The wall makes a great leading line up to the tree and the tree itself is bathed in some good light. I like this image, again not a world beater but a good image nonetheless.

I bloody love gates, and doors either wooden, iron, whatever!! The above image struck me immediately i got to the gate. The frame in frame is always a good trick and the tree is the main subject but the wider vista is also a main focus of this image.

We eventually got back onto the main road and headed back to Downham, which is a lovely village but is in need of a coffee shop!! As we walked back to the car we both agreed we needed to research how to get onto one of the main paths up to the summit and find out the best place to park and be adjacent for the main paths.

All these images were taken with my Sony A6600 with a 16 to 55mm (24 to 85 equivalent full frame lens) and all where handheld.