White Easter

White Christmas? Check - Fernie 2003, La Plagne 2006
White Easter? Check - Lakes District 2008

Before heading up to Lakes District over Easter I'd heard there was talk of snow. I thought to myself it would be nice if we had a massive dump of snow one night and by the next day the clouds had cleared and we had lovely blue skies - I think I'd be able to take some nice shots of that. As luck would have it this was precisely what occurred.

Over the first few days we experienced ridiculous continuous 20 minute cycles where it went from blue skies to gray to sleet to hail to snow to blue skies, but none of the snow was settling on the ground and the mixed weather wasn't producing great light for award winning photographs, water drops on the lenses weren't helping things much either. But after hitting the sack Saturday night and trying in vain to get a good sleep on my super tiny caravan single bed (I was tossing and turning like a rotisserie chicken on slow spin all night) I awoke to clear the bladder some time around 7. As I was about to head back to my "bed" I looked through the frosted glass window that was our door and thought things looked particularly white. As any good detective would have done I opened the door to investigate and was gob smacked to see 15cm of fresh whiteness blanketing the entire region. Like an excited child on Christmas morning I woke up the entire cabin and insisted we go and play. And by play I mean take photos.

This first photo was taken on our first day. Like typical boys we didn't have any sort of plan, we just drove for a little bit, saw some cars parked, decided that was as a good as anywhere to park the car and go for a stroll, then we were off. We had no map, no water, no food, no nothing, apart from a couple of super heavy digi SLRs and a backpack overflowing with even heavier lenses and flashguns. So, off we went, walking, shooting, walking shooting. After a pretty long time we realised we appeared to be going in some sort of loop, and figured we were heading back to the car, problem was we didn't take note of the town name where the car was parked and neither of us were entirely convinced we had our bearings sorted. Long story short we decided to head back from whence we came and when we returned the car (via the pub was some Guinness based rehydration) we drove along the road and discovered we were about 400m from the car when we decided to turn back. Checked the guide book and they reported the loop as a 6 mile walk - and we virtually did it twice! Anyway, to the photo, we walked past an old shed type building, this pot was under the drain to catch any draining water, it was obvious a narrow depth of field and a fast shutter speed were required, and fortunately these are complimentary settings, the light was low so I cranked the ISO up to 1600 and proceeded to take 38 shots. This one (number 23) was the pick of the bunch. I've applied the "Aged Photo" action in Lightroom to give it that ye olde feel.



This next shot was taken on the Sunday morning. Josh and I had been out for about 45 mins taking shots when we decided to head back and grab some breaky in the cabin. As we returned to the caravan park we thought we'd just go for a quick walk in the opposite direction before heading back. Turned out to be a great move. Photographic opportunities were far better in the this direction (sheep, cool trees, great old building, guys in 4 wheel motorbikes with bails of hay). When I took the photo below I'd spotted the scene and thought the road really led the eye through teh shot nicely, there were some interesting trees, a cool building roughly on the rule of thirds, some blue sky and some excellent snow. Then I head a buzzing from over the horizon, right as I'm about to take the shot the local farmer comes over the hill on his little 4 wheel bike to really make the shot. Wasn't sure whether to go with B & W or colour, in the end I decided colour was the way forward, what do you think?



Soon after the above photo was taken I took this next one. The sheep was at the fence but for some reason it ran away when we got near, I thought the path it chose to take was interesting, winding all over the paddock, I used my 10-20 Sigma (very nice lens BTW) to really highlight the distance the sheep had traveled then snapped away.



Last but not least (well, maybe it is least, if this one's not least then it has to be one of the other 3, and let's face it, it's not going to be that pan shot at the top now is it?) we have this one. It's basically just a bit of experimentation with rear curtain flash. Josh and I had trekked for 20 minutes to this spot by a lake (a spot we scouted on out 12 miles hike on day one) as the sun was going down with a view to nailing some first class twilight photos. Unfortunately the clouds weren't helping us and the sky wasn't the deep blue we were hoping for. As we were waiting for it to get dark Josh decided to keep warm by doing some jumps of a rock and genuinely being active, I thought it would look cool to get a shot of him mid flight with the eerie night light as the backdrop. In virtual darkness I was able to locate my flashgun from my bag and attach it to the camera, I set it to rear curtain, put the camera on the tripod, attached the cable release and set the camera shutter speed to bulb. I'd determined that a 4 second exposure was about right to get enough light in so I pressed my cable release and counted to 4, once the time was up I gave the word and Josh ran in and went all Jacki Chan off the rock. When he was at his peak I took my finger off the shutter, the flash fired and the result you can see below. Had I been better prepared I would have sorted out a helmet torch for Josh to wear as this would have resulted in a stream of light flying in off the side of the frame and the photo would tell more of a story, but for my first crack at this technique I was pretty pleased with the result.



So, there you have it, a long one but at least I have some recent photos! This weekend I'm going to this , not sure if it's too late to get tickets for this or not but for you Londoners that read this (Chris, I'm talking to you!) you should get yourself along to these events in the future, they're loads of fun. I'll put up a couple of our best shots from this event next week.