A Walk To Great How
When I set out for The Lakes on Saturday morning, there was frost on the ground, mist in the air and a gentle pink hue in the sky, a beautiful winter's morning. Of course this war around 8AM and by the time I reached my destination all of that was long gone and I was left with harsh sunlight from a cloudless sky.
For my second visit to The English Lake District this year (pictures still to come from that first one), I spent the day pottering around Great How, which is a small fell that lies roughly mid way between Hodge Close and Little Langdale.
I had been scouring the maps and the OS Maps 3D view for potentially interesting photography orientated walks that don't involve a lot of altitude gain so I can take the GFX system (as it's way too heavy for anything involving a respectable amount of ascent, for me at least) and had loosely planned a walk that began at Elterwater and also included Fletcher's Wood and the Tongue Intake plantation, but I didn't fancy the ridiculous parking prices over there, so I reversed the walk and moved the start point to somewhere I knew I could park for free if I got there early enough. Upon arrival I then somehow managed to spend more than five hours traversing the paltry three miles there and back between my start location and Great How, so those other places didn't even get a look in. Maybe next time.
I was a little disappointed in the conditions. Don't get me wrong, it was great walking weather, a crisp, cool day with a gentle breeze, but the bright blue sky and harsh light wasn't exactly ideal for photography, but as I was carrying 6KG of camera gear I was still determined to use it and use it I did, taking nearly 300 shots (I'm going to have to start buying up shares in Seagate ahead of my future storage requirements).
Things improved towards the end of the day though, as the sun sank towards the horizon it began backlighting trees and introducing a pleasant glow to the air.
All images taken with the Fujifilm GFX100S mounted on a tripod and either the 32-64, 45-100 or 100-200 (they all got used for a change ! See EXIF for specifics). Processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23 unless otherwise stated (there are a couple of panos in here).
I've leaned quite heavily into the XPan aspect ratio (65:24) here as it really suits this landscape and still leaves you with a 51 megapixel wide image from a single shot without resorting to stitching, which is great. Most of these wide images were composed as is in camera.
1. Spoils of Wetherlam
I was struck by the sheer scale of these spoil heaps. I have walked around some of them in the past and you really don't realise just how extensive they are when you're up there. I quite liked the soft light on the trees here too.
2. Angry Tree
An angry looking tree, with Pike O'Blisco overlooking the scene from the background, looking like some weird hybrid of Mount Doom and Jabba The Hut.
3. Scars of Wetherlam
A wider shot of the mines of Wetherlam, including the summit in the background. You can just make out the deep gouge of Runestone Quarry, which I visited around this time last year, running downhill above the spoil heaps on the top right.
This is actually two images stitched in C1P. Very occasionally, 32mm just isn't wide enough. I may need to bite the bullet on the 20-23* at some point, although the additional mass might make my camera bag collapse to a singularity, so there's a health and safety risk to consider before making that particular purchase.
*or just the 23mm (which is about an 18mm in old money), used copies of these seem to be priced closer to the reach of mere mortals such as myself.
4. A Tree Lined Rocky Outcrop
5. Trees on a Ridge
There were a handful of shots from this trip where I really liked the composition, but the colours just looked awful. This was one of them, so after a number of attempts to get a nice look out of it, as a last resort I tried a black and white conversion, which seems to have worked out quite nicely (well, much better than the muddy colours at least), reminding me of high contrast fine grain negative films like Pan F, which was always a favourite of mine when I used to shoot black and white film back in the 80s and 90s.
6. Wetherlam
Wetherlam somewhat dominated the view during this walk, fortunately it's full of intricate details from the decades of mining its suffered, making it a great subject to pore over.
7. Great How Views #1
One of the many excellent views from the top of Great How. This is looking North-East towards Ill Bell (the pointy peak almost dead centre in the distance). The high peak on the distant left is Red Screes and on the distant right is Wansfell. In the middle distance sits Loughrigg Fell. My walk last week through Fishgarth's Wood to Todd Crag took me up through, then anticlockwise around the wooded section on the right hand side of this mass.
8. Great How Views #2
This is looking across the Tongue Intake Plantation towards Black Fell. I climbed Black Fell some years ago when I was much fitter and had the mad idea I could manage that and Holme Fell in the same trip, but as it turned out, even then, I'd had quite enough just trudging to the top of Black Fell from Tarn Hows and ended up saving Holme Fell for another time.
9. Great How Views #3
A wider shot looking in broadly the same direction, but this time including the Tongue Intake Plantation in the foreground.
10. Great How Views #4
Another image where I liked the composition but just couldn't get the colours to not look like vomit. In this instance I particularly like the intricate details in the trees and rocky outcrops dotted around those fields. The camera has done a great job of capturing these, it's even picked out individual bricks on those houses nestling in amongst trees, which is all the more impressive considering this is shot with the 100-200, which is considered to be far from one of the better lenses in the GFX line up. I've included the full res image here for anyone wanting to take a closer look.
11. Little Fell
A little fell called Little Fell. By this point the sun was getting low and doing interesting things to the atmosphere. No colourful clouds though as you'd need actual clouds for that.
12. Lingmoor Fell
Another shot where the colours just weren't working. In this instance, my various attempts to mitigate this led me to the somewhat divisive Eterna Bleach Bypass profile, which along with a few further minor adjustments led to this. I quite like it, but then, I've seen the original image too.
13. A Group of Trees
I would have liked to shoot this from slightly higher ground, so that all three trees were contained beneath the distant horizon, but unfortunately the view from a higher position was blocked by another tree. I still quite like it though.
14. Backlit tree at Little Fell
This was taken as I went off piste around the back of Little Fell while heading back to the car. On reflection, I'd like to have captured more of the curve of the wall here. But the backlit tree and soft light pouring in behind it are the real stars in this image for me.
15. Backlit tree at Little Fell #2
The same tree from a different angle. Different processing too as I experimentally tried the Eterna Bleach Bypass profile here and quite liked what it did with the look of the wall. From this angle, the light spill in the atmosphere behind the tree is a lot less intense.
16. Nuclear Fusion at Hodge Close
This was catching the very last light of the day as the sun sank behind the hills minutes later. I wanted to catch the gentle way it was backlighting the trees, but found myself somewhat limited in terms of subjects to anchor the image from where I was stood (on Little Fell) and in the end settled for the spoil heap and workings below Hodge Close. The crop here was added in post and hides a slight bit of hand intrusion at the top of the image where I'm preventing a particularly irritating bit of lens flare, plus some distracting foreground at the bottom that wasn't really adding anything to the image which I couldn't particularly see at the time I took the shot due to shooting into the sun.
