Lake District Landscape Photography Workshop - DAY 2

Day 2 kicked off with a sunrise trip to Derwentwater, where, after a short walk around the boatyard, we settled on Isthmus Bay for starters

Isthmus Bay looks toward Catbells and can be perfect for either a Sunrise or Sunset, but OMG did we get lucky with the conditions here this day

April in the Lakes can be wet, even… WET WET WET !!! But this April proved to be one of the driest in many years, which, aside from a near total lack of clouds, made for some beautiful light for Sunrises

The Key part of today’s Landscape Photography Workshop was Aperture and Composition

The Aperture determines the Depth of Field in an image, which is simply how much of the foreground to background appears sharply in focus

If you use a Shallow Depth of Field by using your lens ‘Wide-Open’, in my case this was f2.8, then only the main part of your image is going to be truly sharp and this can be used as a means of directing the viewers’ eye to your subject

A caveat here though is that (as you’ll see more on another Day’s Blog of this trip) if you’re shooting a fairly wide-angle image, especially wider than 35mm on a full-frame (FX) camera and you focus 20m or more into a Landscape, it can be quite hard to see the fall-off in focus! This is simply that the Depth of Field can appear to be so great there’s really little obvious difference between a wide-angle lens’ recording if you’re shooting even at f2.8

The Key to making shooting wide-open on the aperture is then to have the main subject so close that the fall-off of an out-of-focus background (or foreground in some cases) is really obvious

Conversely, a Great Depth of Field, is where pretty much everything from the closest object to the far background is sharply in focus

To achieve this we use a smaller hole in the lens, called ‘Stopping Down’, and to avoid any lens quality issues or diffraction I set my attendees a minimum aperture of f11

One final caveat to the ‘Stopped Down’ approach to maximising the Depth of Field in an image is that even a 24mm lens at f11 doesn’t truly make everything ‘sharply’ in focus, it can only make everything appear to be what’s known as ‘acceptably sharp’. Personally, acceptably sharp is rarely sharp enough, and so I recommend considering Focus Stacking if it really matters to an image; we’ll come on to Focus Stacking another time

Time for some photos…

The last 3 images in the above section are all of Derwent Isle, and they are very similar for a reason, in that they are all focused the same, exposed the same, and processed the same - so what’s the point?

The point of these 3 images is compostion…

• the first has the waterline along Derwent Isle exactly in the middle of the image, making the foreground and sky equal in size

• the second has the waterline around the bottom 3rd of the image, meaning there is a lot of empty sky, and

• the third has the waterline on the top 3rd, making the foreground more prominent with you being able to look into the water to the bottom of the lake

So which is ‘Correct’?

Quite simply NONE of them and also ALL of them!

While we as viewers may well have our preferences (if we like any of them at all !!!) only the author of the image, the photographer who shot them, can decide which is ‘Correct’, and that’s from their perspective; what everyone else thinks doesn’t really matter - unless its for a competition or some form of distinction, and even then its more likely to be the Judge(s) who decide which is ‘Correct’ in their eye

So don’t be afraid to leave BIG skies in your images, or include HUGE foreground detail. Be challenging and often you’ll see that it works. It may not work for everyone, but who cares!

Leaving Isthmus Bay we wandered across Crow Park, but the water levels here were so low we decided to only talk about the various compositions with the famous ‘Gate’ and its pointless fencing rather than actually shoot it

Friar’s Crag was already rammed with people taking selfies (which on another day can be very photogenic too) so we moved into Strandshag Bay

The low water levels allowed for a few compositions that aren’t usually possible without wellies, but it also meant one of my FAVES wasn’t worth taking either; so this lead to more discussion of techniques regarding shooting Wide-open or Stopped-down, and the benefits of a longer (telephoto) lens for ‘Compression’ too

After a good session challenging my attendees to find a powerful composition of the dead tree (I’ve known of this tree for over 15 years and NEVER seen it alive!), where to create seperation from the background they got closer & closer and wider & wider on their focal lengths, while laid flat on the ground (Goose poo a defo issue!) we went for that all important LUNCH & WEE break

—-::—-

Post food & pees it was off to one of everyone’s FAVE bridge in Ashness Bridge. Perhaps bizarrely, considering how everyone wants to shoot it, I find this bridge very tricky to create a great image with or find inspiration from!

Its not that its difficult to get to, or move around, and its not even that you have to be patient as everyone crossing it MUST have a Selfie !!!

For me, its more to do with the lighting as the high hill means its not lit well in the morning, and the trees mean its not lit well later in the day. Additionally, its hard to place into the far hills of Keswick as another treeline blocks the view

This makes it great for challenging people to decide how best to make Ashness Bridge the defined subject, or a part of a wider, deeper, Landscape vista, or even to make the bridge itself merely the background to another subject (here I chose a small Gorse Bush). I also chose to shoot wide open to focus attention onto the bridge in some images, or merely the water in others

And finally, because I couldn’t get a tripod into place, I chose to shoot 3 handheld images to create a slight effect of blur as a Simulated Long Exposure; to show a varition on technique here one using the Stack Mode Mean, while the other (grittier/sharper) one uses Stack mode Median; as ever, its your choice which you prefer

 

Do you fancy a…

Lake District Landscape Photography Workshop ???

If so, 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 the more you will…

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