Derwent Water.
Cumbria.
17th February 2008
The day had started crisp and clear but as it passed into the afternoon a fine atmospheric haze developed which in some places would have been very unhelpful.
Fortunately this was not one of those places.
I’ve said before that there is no right or wrong conditions in landscape photography, just condition that do not suit certain places.
Derwent Water, with it’s range of hills surrounding it is well suited to a little haze.
A few years ago I was fortunate enough meet Dr. Tim Rudman, who I think is one of the great monochrome printers in this country, and take part in his lith printing workshop.
With a lot of work I produced a beautiful print of a negative taken from this same spot and I was interested to see if I could produce a similar result with digital technology.
Conditions were roughly the same as they had been when I shot the negative so all I had to do was wait for the launch to reproduce the shot pretty much as I remembered it.
I do miss getting my hands wet in the darkroom a bit, but I am able to produce results just as good and sometimes better than my old wet prints now from the computer.
After taking a few shots from the shore near Friar’s Crag, we then moved round to Calfclose Bay to escape the crowds.
I knew a spot that I had shot before that I hoped would look good at sunset with these hazy conditions. I was also hoping for another shot nearby but the water level was too low for that on this occasion.
Jim stayed in the bay near the road while I made my way further out towards the point.
This little causeway of stones changes from time to time as people build or demolish it but it seems that the main rocks always remain.
I like the way it reaches into the scene and provides a foreground in an area that would otherwise show the lack.
After the sun had dipped behind Cat Bells and Skelgill Bank I drifted back to Jim and finally took my last shot as the colours deepened further.
There were about half a dozen other photographers, from a camera club working where Jim was, and one of them seemed puzzled that we were getting shots showing lots of colour as the light faded but his pictures seemed quite insipid and grey.
A quick discussion established that he always left his camera’s white balance set to auto. As a result, his camera was getting rid of the evening colour because it assumed it was an orange cast.
Digital cameras are pretty clever these days, but they still do not know what they are being pointed at and it is down to us, as photographers, to understand the limitations of the technology.
