Lake District - View from Newlands Hause down over Keskadale with Knott Rigg to the left

Today I thought I’d write a little post around what I put into planning a day of landscape shooting.

The first thing I’ll do before a trip like my recent trip to the Lake District is to check the weather, re-check it, and then check it again. The weather in the UK is so varied and fickle, and can easily lead to a completely wasted day if not careful. I’ve always taken quite a keen interest in weather and meteorology and I find that this helps hugely. I have several apps on my phone, and make frequent visits to the Met Office website. I check the radar patterns and projected precipitation and cloud cover levels and often try and make my own interpretations of the expected outcome.

For most people these days, including myself, time is at a premium so it is important not to get these initial stages of preparation wrong. As far as weather is concerned for landscape photography, pretty much any conditions are acceptable except blanket grey skies (which will not make for good images) or torrential rain (which just makes life hard work).

Once I’ve managed to assure myself that the forecast is acceptable, I’ll then start to look at sunrise and sunset times, and their associated azimuths. This then gives me a basic outline of the general directions in which I want to be shooting at those key times.

The next step is to decide the overall area to where I want head to, and then use my saved locations as an initial guide. This has been an area of some issue for me for a while – I’ved used a bunch of different apps and GPS listings software, but not really with any great degree of success. I’ve now started using a combination of Google Maps and Evernote. Google now allow you to save a map, give it a name and then drop pins on it and save it all. You can even add some text description or notes to each dropped pin. For example, I have Lake District and Peak District maps with pins for locations I have previously scouted with some basic notes – these are locations that I know I can go back to and there is a photograph of some description there to be made. I’ll then look at the particular locations in more detail using the sun times and anticipated weather information, to decide whether this is the right time of year to make a photograph at the location and give myself a more detailed location by location plan. If I can’t find anything that suits because it’s the wrong time of year, or I’m not going to have the time required to hike for an hour befoore sunrise up a hillside for example then I’ll revert to a whole series of resources that I’ve built up over time to find alternate locations; endlesss list of websites, books, and magazine articles containing detailled walks, points of interest, landmarks, and vantage points. I also know several keen fell walkers and I’ll ask them for input too as well as having a large selection of 1:25000 scale Ordnance Survey maps on my iPad. The Outdoors GB iPad app is an absolute godsend.

View over Buttermere, Lake District

When I’m planning a sunrise / sunset shoot, there are two things that I’m hoping for. One is colour in the clouds. Generally this is of a red / pinky / orange nature and occurs shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset…. generally…. And then there is first or last light when the sun’s rays are just breaking the horizon and kissing the landscape with it’s softest and most golden light of the day. It’s nice to be able to make photographs at the same location with both the coloured sky and sun’s early rays, but often the colour will appear in the opposite side of the sky to where the sun is rising or setting and without pre-planning or some seriously quick thinking you’ve little or no chance of getting both, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get neither.

For this particular trip these are the steps I followed. I knew where exactly I wanted to be for sunrise itself. Once the sun had been up for an hour, I planned to head up to a nearby waterfall. Then in the less attractive midday light I was to drive up to a pebble beach I had discovered on the Solway Firth for some macro work and then back down to Wast Water for sunset. All points GPS tacked and saved to my Sat Nav and everything looked tickety boo.

12 hours before I was set to depart the forecast was still looking good. Dry with minimal cloud at dawn, with the cloud set to build slowly all day up to nearly 100% by sunset, but dry all day. So I surfaced at half 4, checked the weather again, filled my flask, grabbed my sandwiches and a bag full of gear and started out on the 2 1/2 hour drive up to Buttermere.

Alas as I left the motorway and nautical twilight arrived, I could tell that the forecast was off. And it got progressively worse. By midday the sky was flat grey, and it was raining. Hard. And it didn’t get any better. By sunset at Wast Water, the mist had arrived too. It wasn’t a total right off as I did manage to add some fresh locations to my scouting list but it most definitely wasn’t a day for making award winning photographs. And more frustratingly, with my current schedule, it’s going to be at least another couple of weeks before I can get back up there again….

Sour Milk Gill pouring down into Buttermere, Lake District

The moral of the story: there’s no point getting disheartened when the weather fails to perform. You’ve just got to think on your feet and adapt or sack it off and go home.

So here they are, although not in any order in particular, other than chronological.

First up is an image I made in Spinningfields, Manchester that I submitted in the Urban View category of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 competition, which was subsequently shortlisted.

The Avenue, Manchester - Shortlisted for Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011

Also in January I made the image below with Charlie in Castlefield with one of my favourite modifiers, the Lastolite Ezybox. Details here

Charlie, Castlefield

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale car park before the security guards came along. Blog post here

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale Car Park, Manchester

Maltese street scene – First trip to Malta this year. Blog post here.

Typical street scene in Victoria on the Island of Gozo, Malta

Kayleigh, Trafford Park with the moon. Blog post  here

Kayleigh

Second trip to Malta this year. Blog posts here and here

Doorway, Zejtun, Malta

Anna – “Waiting for a bus?” with some very carefully placed SB900s – blog post here

Waiting for a bus?

Lighthouse, Vilamoura, Portgual. Blog post here and on variable neutral density filters here

View of the breakwater at Vilamoura, Portugal with a lighthouse at the end

Manchester Central Library – post here

Manchester Central Library at sunset

Jenson Button in his McLaren Mercedes tears up Deansgate, Manchester. Post here

Jenson Button

The Lake District. Post here

View up The Struggle in the Lake District on an Autumn morning

Derwent Valley. Post here

Tree in the Derwent Valley, High Peaks

And finally a shoot I did with Sophie and Pat in mid December that I haven’t yet blogged about. Post to follow in the New Year.

Pat & Sophie

So in retrospect I’m more than happy with the quality of what I’ve produced this year, though I do feel that I need to up the quantity next year. And in upping the quantity I’m pretty certain that this will also see an improvement in the quality too. I ought to write a post on my plans for 2012 too. For one, it’ll give me something to be held to, and it’ll also help me to thrash out my thoughts and plans for the next year of my business and where I want to take it. So you can look forward to this in the coming weeks.

Finally, for 2012 I’ll be releasing desktop wallpapers for your personal use. You can download January’s here in 3 separate sizes. There’s 2560 x 1440, 1920 x 1200 & 1440 x 900. Simply click the appropriate link and right click to save to your desktop.

NeilAlexander_JanuaryDesktop - 1440x900

As this’ll be my final post for 2011, I’ll sign off by saying that it’s been a fantastic year for me photographically speaking and I hope that 2012 is even better.
Enjoy the celebrations, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Wishing you a prosperous 2012.
Neil

Crumbling dry stone wall in the Peak District (Click for larger)

Digging through my archives I came across this image I made a few years back on my Hasselblad 503. It’s a scan of  black and white negative that I developed myself. I miss the tactile nature of the process of developing film. I don’t miss the faff, mess, smell, stinging eyes, and did I mention the mess? It’s not something you can do in the comfort of your home office whilst sat in a nice comfy chair watching your twitter feed with one eye on the football……

John Rylands Library, Manchester (Click for larger)

As part of the reworking through my library I’ve found quite a few images of Manchester that I had initially discarded which looking at now, with a slightly older and more informed taste, I think are most definitely usable photographs. Both of these images were taken inside John Ryland’s Library in Manchester on one of their occasional photographic tours. The top photograph is an HDR image made from 5 separate exposures. Unfortunately I made this in the days before I owned a tilt/shift or perspective control (in Nikon speak) lens so in order to return the pillars to their correct vertical position (a wide-angle lens will distort vertical elements), a little skewing in Photoshop was used. Below is the longest exposure of the sequence at 4 seconds – it’s really quite dark in there. You can see that there is some motion blur in the centre which also had to be removed and you can also see how a wide angle lens causes all the vertical pillars to appear to be leaning outwards giving a slightly unnatural feel – this is not how your eyes see it. Well that’s not true. They do, but your brain automatically corrects the information whilst processing the scene.

The bottom image was taken in the vaults of the library, where it’s really dark. There are row upon row of very old books of all shapes and sizes, but I really liked these with the ribbon tied around them to hold them together. This one was processed in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro to add an even more distressed feel.

Old books in the archive at John Rylands Library (Click for larger)

As a photographic tour, this one is well worth a punt. From memory you’ve only got an hour or two, but I highly recommend that you slow right down and take your time. Don’t be like the others in my group who all just dashed off, grabbed a few frames here and there and were done.

Take a tripod and take your time.

Manchester Central Library at sunset (Click to view larger)

As I tweeted the other day, once again I found myself in Manchester chasing the setting sun like a moth round a dying light bulb. I arrived I guess probably around 45 minutes before the sun was scheduled to set with nothing specific in mind. I had a loose plan to shoot the tops of buildings in the remaining light with a view to trying to juxtapose old and new as much as possible. As time was pretty tight I constrained myself to a relatively small area of the city centre; from St. Peter’s Square across to Spinningfields. The top image was pretty much all I could get of the library due to the monumental quantity of builder’s fencing around it’s base, but I quite like the way the lighter stone sits against the darker brick of the council offices. The image was tweaked in Lightroom (I pushed the blacks and the fill a bit) and then opened it up in Silver Efex Pro and went to work utilising a preset, adding a smidge of selenium toning and then a little vignette.

The Avenue, Spinningfields, Manchester (Click for larger)

The bottom image was taken funnily enough near the Avenue…. Not bad as a publicity shot I guess but not much else to say. I had to wait a while for the breeze to blow the banner into just the right position and have punched the blues quite a bit in Lightroom but done very little else.

Both were shot hand held. For the image of the library I had to shoot from some distance to get the angle I wanted, so I shot with the 70-200 racked all the way out and used a lamp post to hold the lens up against to provide some stability, though even at 200mm I’ve still had to crop it a little.

Finally, I’ve got a bit of a feature going up on Photo Creative 365 this weekend in their Sunday Showcase, so head over here on Sunday to check it out.

Have a great weekend.
Neil

Misty trees by the River Bollin (Click to view larger)

To buy a print of this image, click here.

One from the archives for you today. Taken around spring last year down by one of my photographic “muses” – the river Bollin in deepest Cheshire. Shot using a Lensbaby Composer to give the selective focus before I had a tilt/shift, sorry perspective control lens, this image was taken around the same time I shot the “Swinging Tyre“. Tweaked a little in Lightroom and then processed in Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2. I made several different compositions (including this one) and had completely bypassed this particular frame but have since come back to it. It’s now my favourite from the set. I only wish that I’d been able to put a person in between the two trees at the end of the path as it goes into the distance, though from memory it was a) very very damp and b) I really needed to be elsewhere about an hour ago. Still, it was well worth running late as I got some great images that morning.

Anna by Neil Alexander (Click to view larger)

My original plan had been to place a light stand either side of the open windows and light Anna in through the open windows with a close crop showing only the edges of the structure. Alas one of the ends has been filled in, presumably to provide a little welcome shelter to any occupants, but foiling my initial plan. Plan B involved simply placing an SB900 in either corner on the floor inside the shelter at the front directed up and back towards the ceiling, but this looked bloody awful. It made Anna look like some horrendous green vampire as it cast a horrible green glow from the ceiling and the bench everywhere. Plan C took a little more effort, but worked a treat. I rigged two SB900s with Pocket Wizard MultiMaxs and bungeed them to the middle rafter on the ceiling either side of Anna.

SB900 and Pocket Wizard bungeed to the rafters

I had to use the Pocket Wizards because with the flash units being hidden up in the rafters, I no longer had line of sight from across the road rendering Nikon’s iTTL useless. The only way to trigger the strobes was using these radio triggers. Unfortunately for my legs though, these lil’ fella’s are certainly not the new all singing all dancing TTL units that Pocket Wizard are currently flogging around. It’s all manual with these babies. Which meant lots of to-ing and fro-ing across the road to get my levels just where I wanted them. The final image was shot at 1/125 sec F2.8 at ISO200 – it was a bright day, but I found that at this point I could avoid blowing out the background around the shelter and still have enough control over the ambient inside to avoid showing the back wall too much. Angling the strobes forwards slightly, so that they were aimed directly at either side of Anna and slightly towards the camera also helped here. Had I placed them on the front most rafter I would have had too much spill onto the background and I feel the direction of the light on the model would have been much less dramatic. I then applied a little dodging and burning in Silver Efex Pro 2 in post.

Anna by Neil Alexander (Click for larger)

We met up around 11am and headed down to a spot on the edge of Ashley in Cheshire by the banks of the River Bollin. It’s an area that I’m quite familiar with having shot many landscape images there before – this one being my favourite. Knowing the area helps hugely when I’m trying to pre-visualise the final image, and this in turn aids me with composition and lighting at the time of making the image as I already have quite a clear vision in my mind’s eye of how I want the finished product to appear.

I had Anna turn sideways on to me with her back to the tree and then lay her arms along the branch behind her to provide a leading line into the frame. I then lit her with a Nikon SB900 flash inside a 76cm Lastolite Ezybox HotShoe softbox camera left and a grided SB900 camera right. It was one of those days when the sun was constantly in and out of the clouds, so the purpose of the softbox was to provide a soft controllable light on Anna, but it meant that I only shot when the sun was behind the clouds. It gave me more control over the amount and direction of light that fell on Anna, though to be honest most of the time the sun was behind the clouds it diffused the light so much and so smoothly that this light didn’t really effect the final image very much. It was only when the sun went behind really thick cloud that I noticed the light visibly decrease and then the Lastolite came into play. The other light behind Anna did generally make much more of an appearance. To this light I applied a small home-made grid which focused the beam coming from the unit and allowed me to direct it squarely at the back of Anna’s head. This gave me sufficient light to bring out her hair and to separate her head from the tree more. All shot TTL and the above was made using the 70-200 at 1/250 sec, F2.8 ISO 400. The final images was then imported into Lightroom and processed in Nik’s SilverEfex Pro2.

Here’s the set up shot:

Model shoot set up (Click for larger)

Finally as a little Brucey Bonus as it’s the end of the month, here’s a few links that have caught my eye over the last month. Worth a few mins if you’ve got the time……:

• 29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE
• Nicholas Alan Cope Photography
• 21 Photographs And Lighting Setups For Every Occasion | DIYPhotography.net
• JONATHAN CHRITCHLEY – FINE ART OCEAN PHOTOGRAPHY
• Photopreneur’s Big List of Stock Photography Sites (categorized)
• BRIANGRECH studio | photography & design | Award Winning Maltese fashion and advertising photographer
• 15 Misc Portrait tips

And FINALLY…….
If you’ve visited the site lately, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed a wee change…… I’ve moved over from my previous theme to a Graph Paper Press theme and will shortly be incorporating this into a new PhotoShelter site (It’s all part of my grand plan…). However in the meantime, things are liable to change, shuffle about, fall off, go back on and generally get tweaked here, there any everywhere, so apologies in advance. Obviously as many of the changes as possible will be done offline, but sometimes the only way to change bits and pieces is whilst stuff is running live.

TTFN

Golden Bay, Malta (Click for larger)

Click here to buy a print or license a digital copy of this image.

The weather most certainly didn’t play ball. Every day I was there, first and last light were write offs. Dawn would start hazy and cloudy and then roughly an hour after sunrise, the sun would begin to burn through, and sunset was the same, just in reverse. So it certainly wasn’t for the lack of trying that I didn’t get to tick any of these boxes on my list. I was out for every dawn and made a few decent images but none were really as I’d anticipated. Both the images on this page were taken by the Radisson Blue complex at Golden Bay. I sat with my guide and had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the bay probably an hour and a half before sunset. As we sat down to eat the sun disappeared behind the haze, only to briefly re-appear as I hit the beach just long enough for me to get 2 frames off, and that was it – gone again. No golden last light, no pink or orange hues in the cloud just grey haze. So having traveled all that way, I just had to make the best with what I had without getting too downhearted.

Radisson Blue, Golden Bay, Malta (Click for larger)

Click here to buy a print or license a digital copy of this image.

More on Friday…. TTFN

Jay and Vicky (Click for larger)

The morning of that fateful night at Wembley for the Champions League final I shot Jay and Vicky just round the corner from their home for their engagement. Time was very tight for all of us to say the least, but within around 30 minutes of dropping a light stand, we were wrapping up and I was heading off down to London. Jay, using his local knowledge, provided a couple of options for location and we opted for this one which was a little public footpath over a stream. Fortunately no-ones managed to invent smello-prints yet because the stream absolutely stank. Like really badly! I used just the one SB900 in a large Lastolite Ezybox and triggered this with the pop-up flash using Nikon’s iTTL system. Both images were shot at 1/125 sec at F2.8, the top image using an ISO of 800 because of the decreased ambient light under the trees and the bottom one at 200 as the couple were more out in the open.

Jay and Vicky (Click for larger)