After a long day of driving, and a couple of diversions, we arrived at Loch Lomond slightly later than expected but more or less just slightly too late for sunset. I managed to catch the tail end of it, but I suspect if we’d been there at the time I’d planned the sky would have been more interesting for longer.
Can’t do anything about that though, so thankful for the bits of pink and orange I managed to get!
Yesterday morning there wasn’t really a sunrise. Obviously the sun rose, but it was hidden behind a lot of cloud, and sideways rain. So this morning I decided to drive to Castleton, and go up Mam Tor for the sunrise.
My first problem, when I got in the car and set the sat nav up was that I realised that I’d misremembered how long it would take me to drive there. For some reason, I’d thought it would take me 26 minutes (weirdly specific), but actually it was 47. So that pretty much meant that I wouldn’t be at the top or the tor when the sun peaked over the horizon.
My second problem happened when I got there. You have to drive up the road in the image above to get to the top and park. I could see a fair few photographers (I assumed!) lined up on the ridge, and I was suprised by how many there were. However, I wasn’t prepared for how many people would be stood at the top of the tor! There is a car park there and it was full, as were the laybys nearest the car park. So this, teamed with the fact I was already running late meant I decided I was going to walk to the pass, rather than up the tor.
There were a fair few people out overlooking the pass, but far fewer than were up the tor; so I’ll have to do the tor another day. I’m assuming it was so busy because it was “the first sunrise of the new year”. Rather than it’s just always that busy, however I may be wrong!
Happy new year! This year I’m going to focus on; bracketing / bending exposures, focus stacking and the use of flashes.
To get started with this I had a little play with a house plant and my flash guns this afternoon.
After a spell of rainy weather, today was clear. So we decided to go out into the Peak District. After a bit of umming and aaahing about where to go, I settled on Padley Gorge because it is close and I suspected we’d still be able to get parked despite setting off a bit later than usual.
It was a bit chilly in the breeze, but quite a nice day out. We followed a circular from Alltrails that took us down into the gorge before going up to Surprise View and across Owler Tor and back to the car (see below).
Despite the heavy rain of the last couple of days the paths were more or less clear, with just some really muddy small sections that could be stepped over / around.
This is probably going to be the last walk of the year, as the weather forecast once again is not great after today until Monday; wherein I’m trying to decide if to go up Mam Tor, or go around the Ladybower areas.
Yesterday was a nice day; the skies were more or less clear and there was no rain forecast, so we went to Castleton, parked up (free to park on the road in the week if it’s not a bank holiday!) and walked up Cave Dale
I’d set off wearing far too many layers; hat, scarf, gloves, coat, fleecey jumper… And clearly that was all unnecessary and came off half way up!
It was nice and quiet whilst we were there and we were trying to follow a route, but we ended up slightly off-piste. When we were back in Castleton we stopped in a café and had sandwiches and a drink before coming home.
Manadh Photography 