Having attended the Onlandscape : Meeting of Minds photography conference in early November on the edge of the Lake District, I took a couple of days off to explore the Lakes area, before heading over to the North York Moors to be a speaker at the Connected : Landscape Inspired conference.  Being the creature of habit that I am I re-visited a number of old haunts, including Holm Fell, Hodge Close Quarry and  Borrowdale.  I don’t know if this re-visiting of old haunts instead of exploring further is down to laziness, lack of confidence to strike out on my own or the fact that I’m quite precious of my time just now, so to visit new places and not have a succesful trip would be a failure on my part.  (Probably a bit of everything to be honest).  It was the first time in a long time though that I was content to be on my own pottering around the place, getting back to the practice of slowing down – helped in part with my attempts at using tilt/shift lens.

It had been two years since my last visit to the Lake District to do landscape photography and it was good to be back.  I split my time between wild camping in the van and on campsites that were still open (sometimes when the weather gets bad you just need to get hooked up to the mains electricity and hunker down).  I came back to Borrowdale, just south of Derwent Water, a couple of times during my visit, as it has always been one of the go to places for me in the Lake District.  On my first trip out, I headed to the classic Dalt Quarry and it was just one of those visits where the phone camera was doing a better job of understanding the place than I was with the big camera.

On my return trip, I went off the beaten track and headed in to Holmcrag Wood on the banks of the River Derwent.  Here, I think, I could have spent all day there exploring different compositions.  It was fairly windy, which allowed me to try using my tilt shift lens at some faster speeds, whilst trying to keep everything in focus. Greg Whitton covers the use of tilt/shift lenses on his You Tube channel.

All in all a good couple of days exploring.

Click on any of the images to see them bigger.

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