FINAL DAY of my April Lake District Landscape Photography Workshop -DAY 5 - Blea Tarn
Final Day !!! Sob
So after packing up we left our Keswick accommodation early enough to get to Blea Tarn before sunrise (click the link for the National Trust’s website section on Blea Tarn; there are two Blea Tarns, just to be confusing!) - so that’s EARLY just in case you were wondering :D
We’d had FOUR days in the Lakes of beautiful, warm & sunny weather, with hardly a breeze nor a cloud in the sky !!! Unheard of !!!
And yet, these perfect conditions not only gave us a perfect reflection of the Langdales etc. but the water remained almost totally flat for HOURS!
As it was our final day together, we had a good discussion about ALL the various teaching elements we’d gone over for the previous 4 days, and then I led my attendees to my FAVE spots here for the sort of photos that are a wee bit different to the ‘norm’; and which utilise all the compositional pointers I‘d introduced along the way, and especially re DoF use to direct the eye, and the use (or not) of Immediate Foreground Interest (IFI)
IFI is a useful tool at times, but so overdone most of the time as there’s a tendency to think you ‘must’ have IFI in Landscape Photography - you DON’T
But also in some conditions the IFI can be so large and intrusive it dominates the scene, effectively becoming the subject of the photo rather than an aid to it. The biggest ‘danger’ of an IFI dominating an image is the single large rock, or log, etc. These can also sometimes split the image into two halves, the IFI itself and the background - so just be careful on how you use IFIs in your own images as they need to compliment, to aid the story, perhaps to lead into the image, frame it, etc.
As we had no clouds we had no interruption to the light, and so we could shoot & reshoot multiple spots as the Sun tracked across the landscape & tarn before us
This was a truly magical time :)
So as not to bore, let’s jump into the photos, where you can see just how big a difference some minor changes in composition can make…
Oh and we had a brief discussion about using Intentional Camera Movement (ICM)
ICM is growing in popularity as a true creative means of producing works of art as abstractions, but its basically just moving the camera during an exposure; exposure times then need to be low, anything from 1/15th sec to around 1/2sec works best for me
When I first started in Photography (shortly after Stonehenge was built), ICM would have been considered an expensive mistake; or at best referred to as ‘Faffing about’ lol
Expensive as its very hard to get a great image, and most of the time you may need to try a variety of shutter speeds and waving the camera about speeds too to get anything like an image worth keeping; that was defo NOT something you’d do in the days of film unless you really were rich!
Today though, its easy to do as you can immediately review how well its working (or not) on the back of the screen, and adjust settings then repeat, and repeat, and repeat until you either get something nice or you give up - digital means there’s effectively no cost in this, so why not give it a go :)
These two are the best of a poor bunch, and were made just by flicking the camera upwards during the exposure, which was 1/10th sec at f22 at 50 ISO, so yes it was THAT bright!
As we left heading homeward, we called in to the small and lovely Kelly Hall Tarn for some Long Exposure work
The funny here is that although these images are all blended sets of 25secs exposures (one of them is 9 such images, so effectively nearly 4 minutes!) there really isn’t much movement in the sky or even the blades of grasses in the foreground - it was that calm!
And with that - we went our separate ways :)
My April Lake District Landscape Photography Workshop was DONE !!!
Ooh - and I got a FAB Review for it too - but I’ll save that for another Blog Post shortly - cheers
Do YOU fancy a…
Lake District Landscape Photography Workshop
Drop me an email here dave@scapesphotography.co.uk
Give me a call on 07830 085 112
Or use my Contact Form to tell me about where you think you are now and what you’re like to be better at, and we’ll get you Booked In soonest
Landscape Photography in its main three forms of Land - Sea - City is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on
The better you become at Photography, the sooner you can move away from the technical side of things and the more you will…
ENJOY YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY