Terrible Weather = Grand Day Out
On Saturday I'd planned to once more head over to the Dunnerdale fells, which lie on the outskirts of The Lake District, here in northern England, with the intention of visiting the fells surrounding Caw. The forecast for the day was clear skies, no wind and very cold.
As we drove along the narrow and windy roads that lead to Dunnerdale, I noticed a few flakes of snow falling and commented with some surprise that I wasn't expecting to see any of that, but felt quite excited that there might be a bit of snow on the ground when we reached our destination.
About five minutes later, we were driving in heavy snow and after witnessing a number of cars losing control and pulling over, we decided to turn back.
Having driven most of the way to The Lake District from Lancashire, I wasn't keen to write the day off entirely but also didn't want to end up stuck in snow somewhere (my X3 is all wheel drive, but it's not a proper off road vehicle). After considering options, I figured I knew the ideal destination, we could head over to Ings, which is on the A591, a major road leading into The Lake District and park up with some confidence we'd still be able to get back home again later. From there we would hike up to Sour Howes and Sallows, two mid level summits that lie roughly half way between Troutbeck and Kentmere.
I've visited these summits a few times in the past (I even made a video describing the walk on a summers day a few years ago, where it looked very different to the landscape we saw on this trip - the video can be found here on Youtube for anyone interested in taking a look), so even though the snow had started to fall when we arrived at Ings, I knew the route pretty well and was comfortable we'd be safe enough venturing out and seeing how far we could get.
As we made our way along the route, the snow continued to fall and by the time we'd reached Whiteside End, which is where the steeper part of the climb up to Sallows begins, we concluded we'd gone as far as we could safely manage (about 3 miles and 500ft of ascent, there would have been about another mile, but a further 800ft of ascent if we'd continued and we were both getting a bit weary after trudging through the snow) so instead we looped back via a different route that initially veered East towards Staveley for a bit, before curving back towards Ings.
Upon our return to Ings, we found the A591 towards Windermere and Ambleside completely blocked with a queue of traffic stretching off out of view in both directions that was not moving at all. Fortunately, we needed to head in the opposite direction towards the motorway, which was practically empty and my car happily pulled itself out of the 8 inches or so of snow that had fallen around it, so we were a lot more fortunate than the poor souls stuck in that queue, although it was still a slow and treacherous drive back to the motorway.
Nigel will be pleased to hear that all images were taken hand held with the Nikon Z7 + 24-200, not my favourite lens, but under the conditions it performed admirably, plus I wanted to be as light as possible and given the conditions I wouldn't be swapping lenses. On that note, the camera spent most of its time caked in snow as I had it out on a sling strap for the entire 5+ hours of the walk, which it seemed quite happy to cope with as long as I dusted it off every so often.
Unfortunately the camera found itself on the receiving end of worse accidental abuse as, shortly after taking picture #6, I slipped crossing the brook and fell in, momentarily dunking the camera and lens in the water, drenching myself in the process, although as you might expect, my main concern was getting the camera out and dried off as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, there was a derelict building right beside the stream (the insides of which could form the subject of an entire photographic project on its own), so we took shelter in there while I dried the outside of camera off with a microfibre towel I'd packed for this exact purpose. There were no obvious signs of water ingress, being dry inside the mount, battery compartment and card cover, plus there was nothing sloshing around inside the lens, so I think I got lucky, although time will tell, no doubt. I continued to use the camera without issue for the next couple of hours of the walk.
Despite wet gloves and trousers I was fine too (I had spares of the former, but had to put up with the latter), but as photographers, we all know what really matters in these instances.
All images processed from individual raw files in Capture One Pro 23. The dynamic range on most of these was razor thin, so the main processing added to practically all of the images is simply tweaks to the black point and white point on the histogram so there's at least some contrast in the images. They've all been left in full colour too, even though a few might pass as toned black and white.
I don't really have titles for most of these, if I tried I'd probably end up with things like "Tree", "A Group of Trees", "A Tremendous Amount of Trees", there's a bit of a theme going on, so I wont bother.
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Since discovering the 65:24 crop with the GFX, I've become quite fond of it. It does put a bit of a dent in the resolution on Z7 images, but for subjects like this it really seems to work and the full res image is still 26MP.
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This is a shot within a shot that I didn't see while out in the field, which is a shame as I'd have liked a higher res image of this, which is only about 17MP. Admittedly, that's still more than my first four ILC's could manage (Canon D60 - 6MP, Nikon D200 - 10MP, D300 - 12MP, GH4 - 16MP), but I think I may have become a bit of a detail junkie these days having been spoiled with the GFX over the past few months, even the Z7 feels like a bit of a compromise, even though it's really not at all.
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This is the brook I fell into. The building we sheltered in while I dried my camera off was immediately to my right when I took this. You can see it on the right hand edge of the previous shot.
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The ever adorable Herdy, absolutely loving that straw they're eating.
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