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

By noon we had walked all the way around Tarn Hows, the light was too harsh and the area had filled up with people. We decamped to a cafe for lunch and then drove to the Lakeside car park in Keswick. We spent an hour or so here before moving to Castlerigg stone circle for dusk. We had intended to do the circle at dawn the next day but the weather forecast was not good. As it was afternoon there were more people there - basically a ring of photographers around the outside of the circle and a snake of others in and out of the stones taking selfies with their iPhones. All of the stone circle pictures apart from the first (24-70mm zoom) have been taken with a 70-200mm zoom lens on the Nikon D800e. The pictures from the lake have been taken using the 16-35mm zoom, or the 50mm f1.4 lens. Taken using pinhole lens Taken using pinhole and camera movement

At the beginning of November I went on a workshop with Doug Chinnery based in the Lake District. It was a great 2 days where I learnt some and was able to selfishly indulge my photography. There were only 4 of us, including Doug who gave us all masses of attention. The first day we met at the Tarn Hows car park at 6.00am. I had booked into a B&B in Keswick and it was a forty minute journey down to Tarn Hows on the coldest night of the year so far and I had to scrape the frost from the windshield before starting out. The satnav seemed to have planned my journey around the narrowest roads but I got there for 6.00 and the cold night led into a bright and sunny day. Dawn was gentle as there were few clouds in the sky but the morning light was beautiful. We must have spent 5 hours around the Tarn and here are a few of the pictures. I am not entirely happy with them and have spent the whole of November in search of a good autumn shot. They were all taken on the Nikon D800e with mainly t

Boynton Marshes is an area of lovely flat marshland on the Butley River near Woodbridge, open to the sky and salt wind. We went there on a breezy bright day when the reeds were stirring.

These were taken on the D800 using a tripod in the wood at Rickling at the end of October. The trees in the heart of the wood are reluctant to turn gold, even though there are a number of beeches. They are still green now (18th November).

Some pictures taken of the British Library with my Fuji XE1. The first is one of the 'Planets' statues by Anthony Gormley and the second Eduardo Paolozzi's 'Newton', both in the plaza area outside the library. The flecks on Newton are rain drops - it was pouring at the time. The rest of the pictures are captioned. As you can see it was a pretty overcast and dull day, so I set my camera on auto ISO and it coped very well, although I have had to apply some noise reduction to the interior pictures. View of St Pancras Station from the British Library Stairs in the British Library Interior British Library The lobby in the British Library Hahn/Cock on the 4th plinth Trafalgar Square by Katharina Fritsch Selfridges