Forceful mist | mikegreenimages

It’s too sunny today. Last week, it was too murky. Recently, several times, it’s been too rainy. Why is it that – and I’m pretty sure it’s not just me – landscape photographers are so often unhappy, or at least discontented with the weather conditions?

On numerous occasions recently, mostly when I’ve arranged to meet with someone to take photographs, I have found myself complaining, either internally or out loud, about the nature of the weather. Arguably, I’ve focused on bemoaning the quality of the light, rather than the weather itself, but it all comes down to the weather really. One of the features of Great Britain is that the weather is more than a little variable; not in the long term – it can’t reasonably be said to ever be really hot, or really cold (though it tried hard last winter, with a nippy minus 20C near my house), and compared to many places it barely ever precipitates in any genuinely major manner – but in the short term it varies enormously. The result of this is that planning for photography – or pretty much anything else involving being outdoors, come to that – is not as easy as it might be were the weather more predictable.

One day not terribly long ago, I experienced snow, rain and sleet during just one day! I feel entirely justified in complaining about this since it’s unpleasant to be out in, but I may have been compounding my disappointment with the weather’s pleasantness, or otherwise, with additional gripes related to it being ‘not right for photography‘ for a whole series of different reasons. From my sample of half a dozen people, I’m not alone in this manner of thinking.

At the moment, for example, the sun is shining in a clear, blue, near-cloud-free sky; lovely (it really is, better than most summer days in North Yorkshire in recent years). Except that it isn’t what I want to photograph. Everything is totally bleached out, and when the sun heads towards the horizon nothing interesting is going to happen – at least, I suspect as much because today is very much like yesterday (in contradiction to the earlier complaint, of course – you see, not even the variability is consistent!).

What I want to photograph is ‘dramatic light’. I’ve been making images in haze, mist, fog and light rain for several weeks now and I need a change. The trouble with that is that ‘dramatic light’ tends to equate to storms, which in turn are usually characterised by high winds (tripod blowing around – not good) and water in various forms falling out of the sky (uncomfortable and leading to frequent lens-cleaning – also not desirable).

So, if the weather was doing what I want photographically, and providing the much-sought-after ‘dramatic light’, I could still moan about it. This is emphatically not a useful or constructive attitude! A change has to be made, and that’s what prompted me to start writing this musing.

It’s too late to ‘save’ today – I have no real idea of what I can photograph effectively on days like this – but what I’m going to do instead is pore over maps, think about places I’ve been, or intend to go, and work out what type of weather I would ideally like to photograph them in. More precisely, I’m going to produce a table showing weather conditions – I have yet to work out how granular this will be, but ‘clear, blue sky / rain / mist / snow’ is a minimal starting point – and then list every location I can think of against each of these. In practice, I shall probably do this in reverse: start off with locations, work out what sort of weather they’d suit, then tabulate it, determine where the gaps in my little table are, and attempt to fill them in.

Assuming that a) I do this, b) I can think of at least one location for each weather condition, c) I actually remember I’ve done it and use the table, I should be able to find somewhere to go in future, whatever the weather, without wasting all of the time I’d put aside for photography working out where I should be and what I should be pointing the camera at. Put another way, it may help me to avoid the far too common pattern wherein prevarication leads to my not getting out at all as I’ve run out of time…

To get to the point of this post: with the help of this location planning, I am intending to work on the basis, from now on, that there is no such thing as bad weather, in terms of photographs. Instead, I shall work with there are bad combinations of weather and location which can make finding a composition unnecessarily difficult if it’s not been thought of in advance. And I shall have thought of these things in advance!

I shall cite an image I made recently as an example of that hypothesis – it’s not a proof, just an example. ‘Forceful mist’ was made on a bright, sunny day, and that’s precisely why the location worked, being hidden in a deep, shadowy gorge, but with the water lit by the high levels of ambient light.

'Forceful mist'

So, I have a possible solution to enable me to take photographs in virtually any conditions now, provided that I manage to make the table. The trouble is, other than when it’s snowy – I like snow – I shall still be able to complain about the weather.

I thought I’d write a little about this image since it’s actually pretty current – one of my most recent – and hence I can recall in detail how it came about. I also rather like it, which is a good enough reason in itself. It’s a shot of the very bottom of the highest single-drop waterfall in England – or so several sources say, including Wikipedia. Well, more precisely, the Wikipedia entry says that it is ‘claimed to be…’ the highest, etc…. so I’ll go with that. As an aside, it’s not, unless you exclude underground falls. I’ve spent a fair bit of time caving and this, at 30m. is considerably smaller than many subterranean drops! Nonetheless, wherever it falls in the list of ‘big falls’, it’s impressively high for England, and very much free-falling. It’s even been photographed as a free-standing column of ice in the, now distant, past. Sadly, it hasn’t frozen in recent years. I’m an ice climber, hence the interest in the harder form of water, and it would be a great little ascent if it ever froze again.

I was looking for something new to photograph one Sunday afternoon: there’s a limit to how many times I can amble up onto the various limestone pavements around here in search of new lighting conditions to photograph hawthorn trees (splendid as they are in their combination of tenacious wood and craggy rock). Add to that the unreasonably clear, blue sky – not exactly my favourite climatic conditions for photography – and I found myself spending an hour or so scouring web sites and maps looking for something both different and with no need for more than a tiny bit of the blue stuff at the top, or ideally none at all. Coming across the photo of the frozen Hardraw Falls, and never having been there, combined with it not being overly far away, I headed off, armed only with the knowledge that “it’s in Hardraw, and you get to it through a pub” – taking the map would have been helpful too: I had failed to realise that you only get to it through the pub; the Green Dragon Inn, to be precise, which is a lovely old place (dating back to the 13th century!) and whose web site is more confident in asserting the relative height of the falls. i.e. ‘it is the highest in England‘. Odd that! And very possibly true.

So, without a map, but with a very clear idea of where the drop was in relation to the road, I spent the first half hour or so on site in an abortive but very pleasant walk somewhat upstream of, and extremely close to, the falls, after which I made my way back into Hardraw, duly entered the pub, paid the £2 entry fee (fair enough, they maintain the paths, and it’s certainly worth the money) and walked back to very nearly where I’d been before, only around 30m. lower and in the narrow gorge into which the water plummets. Part of the plan had involved the fact that it hadn’t rained much for a few days – this happens in Yorkshire once in a while – and I hoped that the fall would be light and misty, rather than the raging torrent so often pictured. I’d visualised a transparent stream of water and some long exposure patterns when it touched down. I’d also imagined a fair few visitors: as it transpired there was just one family, and they left with some alacrity when I arrived and started fiddling with my tripod – and I don’t think I so much as glared at them! After that, I had the place to myself for an hour; not something I imagine to be common in summer, judging by the large number of paths and picnic tables which grace the few hundred metres from the inn to the falls end of the gorge.

As the image shows, the conditions were exactly what I’d hoped for: not-an-excessive-amount of wonderfully transparent water was conveniently landing on some attractive boulders at the bottom, both allowing the rocks behind to show through and producing a nice spray on the rocks. I still managed to spend over an hour there though. I’d imagined that a long exposure would be what I wanted, so I took several. Examining the results, I could see that the water became far from transparent when exposed for ten seconds plus – obvious in retrospect really … I’d also assumed that the way to photograph the ‘highest single fall in all England’ would be to show it from top to bottom, but in practice this wasn’t where the interest lay for me, it being, somewhat inevitably, a long, thin stream of water with a lot of rather confused and dark rock surrounding it. My captures gradually moved in closer and closer to the foot of the falls, and became shorter and shorter, until I reached the one shown here, which is the tightest, fastest shot of all. I ended up with about thirty images, most of which I was able to cull ruthlessly later that evening after a brief glance – their sin being having no visibility of the background rocks. I also took a variety of polarised and non-polarised shots – this one is polarised, but not a great deal as I wanted to retain the sheen on the rocks.

The only post-processing on this final image, other than conversion from RAW using DxO Optics Pro, is a little dodging and burning to bring out the red areas in the rocks surrounding the stream, and to partially quell a couple of over-bright rocks which are located away from the central area and were distracting.

What did I learn from this? Take a map! To be honest, this is not exactly a new idea; probably don’t forget to take a map, is better… something I know very well, but which I should put into practice with more determination. Also, I shall no longer assume that long exposures of moving water are necessarily ‘best’. The longer ones are pretty, but this, with the curtain of water showing the whole of the background rock area, is much more pleasing and better balanced, if arguably less eye-catching. Still, I’m beginning to prefer ‘interesting‘, to ‘dramatic‘, and there’s far more interest when something unexpected is revealed!

Here’s a link to a large version of the image. Do please comment if you think I could improve it.