If you haven’t decided to follow my new site at artoflandscape.co.uk, here’s something hopefully to tempt you – a new post about a winter round of the Langdale Pikes with a good story and a few good shots:
https://www.artoflandscape.co.uk/post/the-sublime-the-langdale-pikes-in-winter
UPDATE: I’ve added a subascription form to the bottom of the main blog page to allow you to follow the new blog. You’ll get an email whenever I add a new blog post.
I’ll be moving hosting providers soon and one of the casualties of the move will be this blog. I have a new blog as part of the new site but this one won’t be kept going. As this is a WordPress site and the new one isn’t, I think it means that if you use the WordPress Reader to view the blogs you subscribe to, you won’t see the new one.
It’s a shame I have to do this, as I suspect some (many? most?) of you may not come across to the new site, which would be sad. I have to do it though. The new host, Wix.com, has much better features and it means I can combine the main site and blog under a single URL.
I’ve also used this to revamp my branding. Marketing really isn’t my strength but I’ve made a big effort to try and come up with a more professional image which I’ll adopt across social media and also on my market stall, so I hope that works well.
To get the new site going I’ve added some blog posts with new photos from trips I’ve made recently. There’s some pretty good shots there, if I say so myself. I hope you’ll come over and take a look. This URL will continue but my main site URL – artoflandscape.co.uk – will migrate to the new host. For the moment it’s still on the free domain, which is:
FYI, I’m just starting to add my market dates for 2020, with my first one being this sunday, the 2nd February, at Knutsford Makers Market. I haven’t added any Leeds dates yet but will be doing that in the next few days. You can see the full list here.
During a very grey and largely wet Christmas week staying in the Lake District we did have one beautiful day which just happened to be Christmas day. Instead of opening presents and pigging out on chocolates and roast dinner we got up early and did a wonderful walk up Coniston Old Man and around to Dow Crag. As well as being a lovely mountain walk I had some good winter light to get some nice shots. Continue reading
Well happy new year to you. My new year will be largely taken up with restocking after a bumper set of Christmas markets and starting to think about moving house, which means decluttering, DIY and such like to make our current house look as desirable and saleable as possible. Hopefully I’ll still have time for some photography in between.
In the meantime here are a few shots I took on a local wander around the back lanes where I live on new year’s eve. I put my Olympus OMD-EM10 into JPEG mode and black and white, just to see what would happen. As usual when I do such things I was surprised that I got several quite nice shots.
This is positively the last set of shots currently in my catalogue from Holme Fell. It was such a beautiful autumn afternoon that I couldn’t resist. Continue reading
Finally deciding it was time to move on from my obsession with Holme Fell I tried a new area for the first time. Driving north alongside Coniston Water in the Lake District I had several times thought it was worth a look and today was the day. Just to have a look. The weather wasn’t promising and I didn’t know the area well. Continue reading
This was the first day’s shooting with my new Panasonic lens for my Olympus OMD-EM10 and I was excited by it. Also the first time I’ve been able to try using my Lee neutral density graduated filters with the Olympus and I was interested to see how that would work ( here’s how it worked) .
The weather turned out fantastically well and I went back to my current-favourite place – Holme Fell again. I hope you’re not bored with shots of the Langdale Pikes and Fairfield.
The sunset was glorious, though lacking any clouds to add drama, but the larch trees were lit up in flame. After the sun had gone I kept shooting to get some of the lovely mauve colours on the landscape.
I’m impressed by the quality of the new lens. Better than my Pentax, more consistent than the old Olympus lens I had on the OMD. Not bad for £80. I also took some shots with the Pentax, which have quite a different look to them though whether you’ll notice is doubtful.
Here are a few more shots from Holme Fell, the location I’ve been visiting so much recently.
I’ve been asked to give a talk to a local natural history society (they’re booking well in advance – this is scheduled for February 2021!). For my subject I’ve decided to talk about how our supposedly natural landscapes are actually man-made. This was prompted by a TV programme I saw recently about some part of the countryside where a woman was asked why she helped out with the local grouse shoot when she was a vegetarian. She said these pastimes help to conserve the landscape that we love. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to that landscape if it were left to its own devices. It wouldn’t spontaneously cover itself in concrete.
However, it is a fact that most of the pretty countryside we like so much in England and Wales is entirely the work of humans. Holme Fell is a very good example. The tarn you see in two of the shots, Yew Tree tarn, was created in the 1930s when the landowner decided to dam the river. The wider fell area is full of old mine workings, now abandoned (very beautifully) to silver birch and larch. Most of the cumbrian fells are generally denuded of trees because of hundreds of years of sheep grazing.
This is the countryside we love, but we have made it that way.
I just found this post in my Drafts folder in WordPress and realised it had been there since early summer and never posted. I think I held it back because the trip hadn’t fully worked out and I didn’t get many shots from the morning sunrise. Looking at it now though, there aren’t many shots here but they’re nice ones so here’s the post, to remind me of summer wild camping trips.
After a good night’s sleep in warm, calm weather I eventually awoke to my alarm from a deep sleep at 4:15 am. The sky looked very promising and there was an almost-full moon on the other side of the valley. I got up and got ready and hid my camping stuff out of sight so they wouldn’t be seen in any shots I took.
I got increasingly excited as the clouds started to catch with orange light. However it was clear that the sun was going to come up right behind the highest part of the hill beside me – something I could have found out easily if I’d checked my compass. More to the point there were enough clouds in the way that the initial promise soon fizzled out. Just like my Eskdale trip of a few days before the sunrise was to disappoint and leave me with unfinished business. So – not many shots in this post but hopefully I’ll be back.
Anthony Shaughnessy 