Framedlight

We had a smashing breakfast in Morrisons and a good chat before departing for a very picturesque small quarry south of Derwentwater. I do not know when the quarry had shut down but the bottom now contains a small pond and saplings have grown up around the sides. It is roped off so it is not possible to get right in but you can take pictures from the front and also, by climbing up from the sides, down from a more elevated position. The sun came through the clouds while we were there catching the tops of the trees on the top edge of the quarry. These were the best pictures I managed to take over the 2 days as it was such an interesting area. Again I made extensive use of the 70-200mm zoom and I was so glad I had packed it (and lugged it about). I am afraid I got rather fixated on a small birch that was growing in front of some strange streaked yellow stains in the slate and there are too many pictures of this. As time goes on I will come back to the blog and remove some!! After lunch we...

We had arranged that Doug would put his head outside his campervan early - 4.30am to scout out the weather conditions and email us as to whether we should meet at 6.00am by the lake or at 9.00am in Morrisons for breakfast. I woke at 4.45 to take the email, and indeed rain was lashing down outside. However I could not get back to sleep and by 5.30 the rain had moved to an intermittent drizzle so I decided I would get up and mosey on down to the lakeside to see if I could make anything of it. I walked down the footpath that runs along the shore edge taking pictures of whatever took my fancy. The footpath ended on open marshy ground, covered with geese, with a view over to Catbells. There was no pink dawn but some interesting shots in the greyness nonetheless. I struggled focusing when I first got there. It was too dark for the autofocus and I could not see well enough to manually focus. I used my head torch in the boat shot to give a small circle of light on the side of the nearest boat ...

We spent the weekend with Alan's mum who lives in Milnthorpe on the southern tip of Cumbria. On Saturday we decided to go for a trip round a part of the Lakes I had not visited before. We made a circuitous journey through Ambleside and Keswick, around the western shore of Derwentwater, over the Honister pass, past Buttermere and Crummockwater to Cockermouth. There we visited the house Wordsworth was born in and came home late via a more straightforward route. The weather started out wet but as we went over the pass the rain turned to snow and shrouded the hills in mist. Very cold but atmospheric. Here are the photographs from that trip, starting at Derwentwater. I really like the effect the snow has given to two of the Honister Pass photographs I have a trial version of Heliconfocus loaded and have tried to do some stacked focus landscapes, without much success. The Derwentwater picture I hadn't actually needed to stack but when I ran about 4 pictures through Helicon I got ...