Andy Gawthrope Photography

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Tag: England

  • Hilltop farm – The Yorkshire Dales

    Hilltop farm – The Yorkshire Dales

    After my previous post, I thought I’d share another photograph from the Yorkshire Dales trip earlier this year. Compare it with the photograph in the previous post and the differences between the high moorland and the lower-level stone walled fields are stark.

    Looking at my work over the last year I’m seeing a trend towards more panoramic and square format landscapes. I find this trend interesting. It seems to have started quite unconsciously, grown and is now something I really like! Each panoramic photograph is the result of merging 2 – 5 normal sized images. Thus the resulting photograph can be large both in print and binary file size. Processing these large images does take noticeably longer and more compute resource. A recent image from Dartmoor consisted of 5 x normal sized images – that’s 250M pixel! Just for comparison, the new iPhone X has a 12M pixel camera. Rock on 🙂

    With this trend towards panoramic’s I’ve also noticed I’m using wide-angle lenses less as features become too small. My go to lens is now a standard lens (50mm) as it gives that little bit of magnification.

    But large photographs really need to be seen full-size but therein lies a problem. So much detail is lost when they are shrunk to fit social media and small screened computers such as laptops. Such a shame 🙁

    Andy

  • Rocks near Haytor, Dartmoor

    Rocks near Haytor, Dartmoor

    Continuing with the previous thread about panoramic format photographs here is another. Perhaps not so large, this was only 3 x 50M pixel un-cropped!

    Looking at this image you could be forgiven for thinking it was a warm summers evening. How wrong that would be! I took this only recently (November 2017). There was a 20 to 25MPH wind blowing, the air temperature was about 3 degrees Celsius and the afternoon had been pretty much dominated by very heavy dark clouds and rain showers. Basically it felt like a couple of degrees below 0 Celsius. Chilly when you are stood pretty still for over an hour! 🙂

    Haytor is one of the famous Dartmoor tors. I’ve spent time in its vicinity before but never been happy with the results. This time I walked away from the tor to the West just exploring the landscape looking for nice compositions. On one occasion I had to shelter out of the wind as a heavy rain shower passed through. That rain must have been almost frozen as it really hit hard and stung the face. Most unpleasant! After some distance I spotted this tree which I felt contrasted nicely against the rocky tor. I stayed at this location until after sunset shooting images of the surrounding area but this turned out best due to a the rookie mistake of not ensuring the camera was absolutely still in the buffeting wind. Lesson re-learnt 🙁

    I must admit to being surprised when another photographer arrived and then another just before sunset. Having three photographers converge at a random location on Dartmoor must be pretty unusual. But maybe I stumbled on something more well known…

    Andy

  • Clevedon pier sunset

    Clevedon pier sunset

    Sometimes photography is essentially luck.  And this photograph is just that 🙂  I had set-out from home earlier in the day with the specific intention of exploring the coast just South of Bristol.  I was aware of a pier having seen ‘pier’ on a map but had no intention of going to Clevedon let alone photographing the pier at sunset.  But at the end of the day I found myself on the beach then the promenade just as the sun was setting.  The photograph says the rest!

    The sky is wonderful, but I really like the orange ball of the sun and the way it can be seen through the windows of the pier. 🙂

  • Buttermere dawn

    Buttermere dawn

    I had opted to camp in Buttermere behind the Bridge Hotel and awoke to a perfectly still, blue sky morning.  A short walk later and arriving at the lake the water was almost a perfect mirror, reflecting a sky in which the only things visible were the contrails of early morning flights.  The overnight mist still clung to the lake adding an ethereal quality.

    On seeing the tree I knew it had to be central to the photograph but I could also see that a few minutes later the Sun would breach the distant hills and start to stir the air dispersing the mist and disturbing the mirror calm waters.  As the distant hills and the side of the tree facing me where in shade I quickly decided that the photograph would be a silhouette knowing the blue sky would back-light the branches and the leaves revealing an interesting level of detail to the photograph.

    Andy

  • Moorland photography

    Moorland photography

    Black Tor on Dartmoor lies just South of Princetown on the B3212.  It’s not a large Tor, in fact, it’s a rather small, non-descript Tor easily missed as its set back off the road just over the brow of a hill.  It’s on a rise and stands just a little higher than the surrounding landscape so offers some nice views.

    Moorland usually consists of large expanses of similar looking terrain which, without, something to draw the eye results in photographs that are just plain boring 🙂 Dartmoor is nice in this respect as its peppered with little hills topped with rocky Tors and the occasional forest or large group of trees.

    Moors are often associated with being windy places where the weather changes from sunshine and blue skies to cloud, rain, fog, hail and snow all within a couple of hours.  They are thought of as intimidating and often scary places.  So, people strongly connect to photographs communicating one or more of these characteristics.

    The photograph above is a more subtle, a softer, interpretation of those characteristics.  In it I’ve tried to convey vast open space whilst using the tall grasses and boulders to provide the sense of an exposed, desolate hill top.  Sub-consciously the viewer knows it’s likely to be a windy and cold location. 😉

    Andy