One essay finished and one dissertation draft sent off for feedback; this week I finally managed to relax a little after a full on semester and I finally managed to get out into the Peaks! Unfortunately the weather forecast for this week was not all that compliant with rain forecast for most of it, but a foggy Tuesday morning looked like my window of opportunity. I would have liked to have gone to one of the many edges/tors but in the face of thick fog I decided to head to Padley Gorge to ensure I had plenty of close up subjects to play with.
The combination of woodland, winter and fog makes for quite a photographically challenging scene. Woods always look a bit messy, finding a clean photo is a challenge, but adding winter to the mix means that the floor is also strewn with rotting leaves and a lot of mud. Fog added quite an interesting element, fading away a complicated background but completely flattening the light.
I mostly chose to focus on particular elements of the landscape to keep out some of the clutter, here I used the short end of my Nikkor 70-300mm to close in on the falls and a little beech tree.
Unfortunately I don’t have a circular polariser filter for either my wide or long lens, meaning that I couldn’t rid of the reflections on the river or wet leaves, leaving my shots with less contrast and saturation than what I would like. However I do have a ciruclar polariser for my nifty fifty (Nikon 50mm f1.8), which enabled me to get the richer look that I was after. The shot below was actually a 3 shot vertical panorama, which I underexposed to only leave detail in the waterfall.
Though most the trees were bare (^ short of the odd sprig of oak leaves ^) lots of little beech saplings punctuated the woodland with bright bursts of orange. In this shot, I just decided to embrace the chaos!
I head home for Christmas soon, so I won’t be returning to the peaks until 2016, but hopefully I’ll be able to get out and about in lovely old Lincolnshire!
