Dubs Hut & Hay Stacks, Buttermere

Mine workings near Honister, Buttermere

On my recent visit to the Lake District, one of the aims was to do a little mountain photography.  Unfortunately the cloudy weather put the stops on that, but the day I arrived the weather looked promising.  The plan was to arrive earlier in the day to leave more time for an evening outing, but thanks to hideous roadworks - Birmingham through to Manchester - the journey took much longer than it should have.  So when I had arrived there was only about 1.5hrs before sunset.  Not enough time for much....

This time of year the sun sets further to the South and behind the mountains in the photograph so, down in the valley, the sun was already perilously close to disappearing behind the mountains.  The only other option was to head to the tops - no easy thing with such little time...  I was staying at the Bridge Hotel in Buttermere so, the quickest access to the tops was a 20 minute drive to the Honister mine car park followed by a mad dash up the track in the hope of getting somewhere nice by sunset!

So that's what I did and it almost worked.  I got to the Dubs hut just as the sun set with no time to go further.  In fact, I would have needed to be there about an 1.5hrs earlier to allow a little exploration and setup time.  But that's how it went :-(  The result was a very quick hunt for a composition in the fading light.  Anyhow, for what was, essentially, a grab shot I'm pretty pleased with the result. :-)

The photograph is the result of stitching three individual images so, like all my panoramic photographs its pretty wide and computer screens don't them justice.  At full size, the detail in the hut, surrounding stones and distant screes is impressive but this is lost when displayed small-size on computers.

The plan is to do much more mountain photography over the coming year.  I've asked Santa Claus for a carbon fibre tripod :-)

Andy