Tag Archives: limestone pavement

Musings on: increasing your ‘photographic luck’…

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“You were lucky to catch that shot!”

I’ve heard that said more than a few times since I started making ‘serious’ photographs, mostly from – and here I’m continuing an entirely tongue-in-cheek gripe from my last blog item – non-photographers. More specifically, non-photographers who have cameras and don’t often ‘get lucky’ in the same way that they perceive that I do.

In recent months, I’ve adopted the approach of not arguing the point, preferring the “Yes, didn’t I” response to “Well, no, I did lots of preparation…..”. The trouble is that the type of preparation I’m talking about here is not the specific planning I discussed in my last article on using The Photographer’s Ephemeris and Google Earth ground level view to pre-visualise compositions. That’s a possible, and very useful, aspect of preparation, but not the whole of it, and it’s the part which is quick and easy to describe:

“TPE tells me where the Sun and Moon will be, and Google Earth shows me what the view is from any given point”;

done; simple; and it doesn’t usually engender a great long debate, unless the questioner is genuinely interested in the implicit how part of that statement. Conversely, trying to explain what I’m discussing here, the wider factors which go into being prepared to make a photograph, can end up in…… let’s say ‘a degree of contention‘.

I think the contention arises since what I’m essentially going to argue in this article is all about probability and statistics – not literally, this isn’t a mathematical treatise of any kind, but that’s what it amounts to. In summary:

if I prepare better for a photographic opportunity which may arise, the likelihood of my making a half decent image when that opportunity does arise goes up considerably. Put another way “you make your own luck”.

At its most reductive level, the old adage that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you all the time’ clearly comes into play: it’s much more likely that I’ll ‘get lucky’ if I always carry a camera. I don’t, and I know that reduces my opportunities, but pretty much everything in life is a compromise and I’m not yet ready to start carrying my backpack of kit at all times.

“Understand your equipment as well as possible.”

That point does lead to the first and most obvious element of ‘being prepared’, however; the technical element. There’s little point in having a camera capable of capturing good images and failing to learn how to use it flexibly. More accurately, and returning to the probability idea: if you do learn as much as possible about how your equipment works, what it can and can’t do, when and how to use which filters, and all the other things which make up the technical side of photography, then the chances of getting all those technical details right, even in a rush, when the fabled opportunity arises are considerably raised. Often, that moment of stunningly fine light lasts just that, a moment, or a few seconds; fiddling around with camera controls for any longer than strictly necessary is likely to lead, as they say, to disappointment. Personally, I don’t find the whole ‘how to drive a camera’ thing terribly interesting. Important: very much so. Interesting: only in the way that any complex piece of kit is interesting – it’s not what making images is about (to me, that is – but each to their own!).

I’m not ranking aspects of preparedness; I think that all the elements I’m writing about in this item are important for improving the odds of ‘getting lucky’, but I do think that familiarity with the equipment – camera, lenses, filters, tripod, light meter; everything – is fundamental. To veer dangerously close to mathematics again: it’s a necessary but not a sufficient requirement, and it’ll increase the probability of success.

“Maintain a list of compositions.”

Another – not the second, just another – element is having compositions in mind ready for when the light is either ‘good’ or ‘right’, depending on whether you’ve also worked out what the ‘right’ light will be for a given composition. This is a big topic. It covers a range of time, in terms of preparation, from seconds to months, or even seasons. At one end of the scale, I like to look around an area for compositions before leaping into getting the camera out; there’s little point in waiting for stunning light and then frantically hunting around for something to put in the frame. What that means in practice is that I will sometimes scout a location and not actually make any exposures. More probably I’ll take a few shots as reminders, even if the light is uninteresting. That’s where the longer term comes in: I’m gradually building up a set of notes on things that I think may be good compositions, given certain lighting conditions. The idea is that I can revisit those areas at the appropriate time of year, or when a particular weather pattern is predicted, and know exactly where to go. In theory, it means that I can hurry to a pre-planned composition and get set up as soon as the weather deigns to do what I’d like it to, and having several of these ideas ready means that there’s more chance of at least one of them fitting the weather on any given day. Again, it increases the probability of being lucky.

Naturally, that sort of preparation is easiest for local subjects. There’s a particular composition I have in mind in the Cairngorms, but I’m not about to drive hundreds of miles on the spur of the moment when the met office predicts a certain weather pattern which will suit it! That said, I’m currently working on – and when I say ‘working on’ here, what I mean is that I have decided to do this and will shortly get my act together and start – I’m currently working on making a list of possible compositions in the area of Scotland I shall be visiting in a few months. I’ll be using TPE and Google Earth for this, as well as my existing knowledge of the area and OS maps for access routes and timings. The intention is to arrive knowing where to go in response to a variety of weather conditions, both at different times of day and at those points when the rain slackens off and the midges aren’t too active.

To reiterate the main theme of this article, whatever level of compositional preparation I actually do, whether it’s on the obsessive end of the scale or the ‘here’s a list of a few ideas‘ end, it will increase the probability of coming back with worthwhile images from a trip. Clearly, in any distribution of probabilities, there is the potential of returning with ‘nothing’ – I would like to make that as unlikely as I can, in advance.

'Unexpected sunshine'

“Revisit good compositions.”

On a related facet of preparedness: whilst visiting a place once, working out some compositions, and then pre-visualising the weather that would suit them is a good technique, it’s even better to simply revisit those places, if possible, and see how the weather affects the scene. I used to be very disappointed if I went out and failed to capture a ‘keeper’; now, whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I don’t care, I’m much more relaxed about it. Considering the image above, for example: I’ve been to this site numerous times – it’s very local to me – but that’s the first time I’ve bothered to photograph it as it’s the first time the light was at all interesting for that particular composition. I’m fairly happy with this image, but I shall undoubtedly go there again, and I’m sure I’ll use a similar composition in the hope that the lighting will be sufficiently different for that to be worthwhile; ideally, it’ll be better in some way, of course. Again, having discovered and practised a composition which is pleasing, at least to me, I shall increase the likelihood of eventually using it to produce a great shot by photographing it in varying weather and at different times of year.

“Stand around and do nothing for a while.”

Considering the probability of success in the time frame of minutes or hours, rather than days or seasons: if the weather is changeable, or it’s getting towards sunset, I’ve taken to working on a composition, getting everything as ‘right’ as I can in terms of framing and technical aspects, and then just waiting for the light to change. I enjoy just being outdoors and in a beautiful place, whether I’m already very familiar with that place or not, so I’ve never so far considered it to be a great hardship to simply stand or sit awaiting a change in the light. (As an aside, this particular behaviour is the one most likely to produce a certain degree of discontent on the part of anyone you’re with who’s not also attempting to make photographs, as I discussed in an earlier article!)

Of course, the whole ‘waiting around doing nothing’ thing can be more of a challenge in various forms of inclement weather, but it’s still worth it. The image below was taken at sunset, or ‘mid-afternoon’, as it might be called. It’s a good example of a few of the above approaches to upping the probability of success. This tree is close by and I’d photographed it a few times. On each occasion, I imagined that it could look very good in snow; so, when we actually received a little, I took myself up there with the hope of making this precise image. As may be obvious, it was rather chilly up on the scar that afternoon; minus 12C in fact. Had I not been familiar with my kit, my fingers would probably have become even colder, whilst setting up for the shot, than they did. Had I not pre-visualised and planned the composition, then I’d have spent time wandering around on what was extremely slippery limestone pavement – it’s not the easiest or safest surface to amble across when dry and warm, and it’s even less conducive to extensive exploration when covered in snow and ice! As it was, I was able to go to exactly the right place, having readied the camera with the appropriate lens and settings back at home and having not wrecked the snow by walking on it, looking for the right spot. Setting everything up took under a minute, followed by roughly an hour of standing still, becoming progressively colder as the light changed. I’m rather fond of this shot, and I sincerely doubt that I’d have made it without all the luck-inducing preparation.

'White Scar winter hawthorn'

“Get out there, even when the weather looks vile.”

One final thing is worth mentioning, mainly since I’m very susceptible to this particular problem and am working on avoiding it. Planning in advance to go somewhere, knowing that there is a usable composition, particularly when the ‘somewhere’ in question is a long walk up a hill, helps to avoid crying off due to unappealing weather. The banner image at the very top of my blog is a good example of that. It was raining heavily when I set off and I had to really force myself to get up on the scar, knowing there was a tree up there and hoping for some kind of dramatic light to occur as the various storm fronts passed over. It did occur; I was ‘lucky’. That said, I was lacking in every other area of preparation for this shot. It was the very first image I took after I’d bought a ‘proper’ camera and set out to deliberately make photographs; so in many respects I really was lucky on that occasion.

I’d have been even ‘luckier‘, however, had I already learnt how to use the camera, bought a tripod, examined the area in advance, and not been shooting hand-held jpegs on full automatic…. There are better compositions of this tree and, if I’d prepared for luck, this would have been a better shot. Still, maybe the next time I’m fortunate enough to experience light like that, it will be!

I haven’t even mentioned here that this sort of preparation can help with inspiration, but this article is already quite long enough, so I’ll save that topic for another possible post. As always, I’d welcome your thoughts and recommendations for other things which can increase the ‘getting lucky’ factor in making landscape images.

Addendum/edit: Tim Smalley has a very nice piece on his blog covering some of the same ground as this. Definitely worth reading: Forget about the camera for a minute

The making of: ‘Selenehelion’ and ‘Pendle mist’

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This pair of images are most notable, to me at least, for being radically different in colour, yet taken from precisely the same place within minutes of each other, albeit in different directions. They also amuse me in retrospect since neither includes the primary object I intended to capture when I started walking up to White Scar on the morning of the winter solstice; namely, the eclipsed Moon.

After considerable effort in generating self-motivation on the previous day, I managed to get up at some hour which should have been the end of a very late night, not an early morning, and walked over rough moorland and scrub grass for getting on for an hour to reach the prominent tree on White Scar, only to find that I had walked too quickly, or at least that I’d given myself too much contingency. As a result, I was up on the limestone pavement for ninety minutes in total, which would have been fine had the temperature not been approaching minus 20C that morning. I’m used to low temperatures, but standing around doing nothing but fiddle with camera equipment is not the optimal way of keeping warm and I certainly did get very cold before I headed back down again.

I should perhaps describe why I was there on that obviously inhospitable morning. I had gone up to photograph the selenehelion, thinking that the tree would make a good foreground for the hills of the Lake District. Wikipedia defines a selenehelion as follows:

A selenelion or selenehelion occurs when both the Sun and the eclipsed Moon can be observed at the same time. This can only happen just before sunset or just after sunrise, and both bodies will appear just above the horizon at nearly opposite points in the sky. This arrangement has led to the phenomenon being referred to as a horizontal eclipse. It happens during every lunar eclipse at all those places on the Earth where it is sunrise or sunset at the time. Indeed, the reddened light that reaches the Moon comes from all the simultaneous sunrises and sunsets on the Earth. Although the Moon is in the Earth’s geometrical shadow, the Sun and the eclipsed Moon can appear in the sky at the same time because the refraction of light through the Earth’s atmosphere causes objects near the horizon to appear higher in the sky than their true geometric position.

To summarise its relevance to making an image: it’s a specialised lunar eclipse during which the Moon should be an interesting colour, and there should briefly be sunlight reaching the ground whilst the Moon is still both visible above the horizon and discoloured. To me, it sounded like a good opportunity for a White Scar photograph with a difference.

All of those things were accurate, with the exception of the ‘Moon is still visible‘ aspect. Oops. I’d used the remarkably useful (and free!) piece of software called The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) to determine where the Moon would be when it set, where the Sun would be at the same time, and hence exactly where and when to stand on the White Scar pavement. What I had not done was check with sufficient thoroughness as to the relative height of the Lakeland hills – something which would have been very simple to do with TPE – I’d just assumed that the scar would be high enough. As it turned out, I had an excellent view of the Moon becoming progressively more eclipsed as I approached my chosen area, only to watch it disappear behind the very distant hills just before the Sun came up. Somewhat irritating!

Nonetheless, the whole ‘gathering light from all the simultaneous sunrises and sunsets on the earth‘ aspect worked very well indeed, so much so that the colours in the RAW files I captured needed to be desaturated to complete the two images; not doing so just looked ridiculous and false.

'Selenehelion'

The pink image, the one I’ve called ‘Selenehelion’, is looking towards the Lakes; it’s the image I’d planned, though with a singular lack of the Moon of course. I’d been hoping to get far enough from the tree to make the hills larger, but backing off further than I did meant that the hills themselves started to disappear over the horizon as the ground I was standing on dropped away. The resulting image is a compromised version of the composition I was aiming for: it trades off making the hills as large as I could in favour of aligning them against the tree.

'Pendle mist'

The orange image, ‘Pendle mist’, was an unanticipated bonus! The extreme cold that morning meant that the air was very clear and distant Pendle Hill was remarkably prominent on the southern horizon. It also had a thin, low layer of mist surrounding it. I occupied myself and tried to keep warm as I waited for the few minutes of the actual selenehelion by rotating the camera away from my composed shot of the hawthorn tree and making a series of captures of this famous, Lancashire feature. I deliberately blurred the foreground slightly as I was expecting an ethereal ‘hill floating on mist’ shot. As this turned out, it’s not floating quite as much as I’d hoped, but it’s certainly not a view of Pendle Hill which I’ve seen often. Comparing the two photos, the contrast between the vivid pink of the westward shot and the warm orange of ‘Pendle mist’, to the south and just a few minutes before the Sun rose to the left of it, is ….. ‘somewhat marked’.

Both these images have been dodged and burned slightly to focus the composition on those parts I felt important, but the colours are rendered very much as I saw them, with a slight reduction in the pink if anything.

I found this exercise to be a good learning experience, quite apart from being fun to do and producing a couple of reasonable images. Even dressed in ice climbing clothing, I was still slightly chilled through standing still, but it convinced me that getting up horribly early is worth it. And it also showed me, through my failure to do so properly, that I should use TPE more thoroughly in future when planning compositions, and that I must make sure that marginal aspects – in this case a ten minute window in which to make the shot – should be checked carefully for the relative heights of the shot’s various components! That said, had I known that the eclipsed Moon would be hidden, I might easily have failed to convince myself to get up, and I’d then have missed what turned out to be an amazing light show for twenty minutes or so.

There are larger versions of each of these images on my Flickr ‘stream.

The making of: ‘Twisleton hawthorn’

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These blog things, they came about as on-line diaries, so I think I’ll start with that approach, except that I’ll write a few short items about how I made particular images – diaries of images; and, for want of a better starting point, I’ll talk about the one I’ve used as a banner.

I’ve entitled this image various things over the year or so it’s existed, and in its various forms. Now, I just tend to call it ‘Twisleton hawthorn’, it being arguably the most prominent and interesting tree on Twisleton Scar End, in the Yorkshire Dales, and also being a hawthorn. The other titles have tended to have the word ‘stormy’ in them, since it was; very! Seconds after I took this image, the skies did that ‘opening’ thing you hear about and I was rapidly rather damp. The other reason I thought I’d describe the making of this image is that it was one of the first ‘good’ photographs I took after moving from taking holiday snapshots, and pictures high up on glaciated mountains, to buying a dSLR and attempting to make something a little more than snaps. I’d taken a couple of other nice images a few days earlier (the first one on my Flickr stream), but those were pure luck: the light happened to be good one morning, and I had coincidentally woken up early (not that the latter is at all common, so I was doubly lucky!).

So, this was the very first time I’d gone out, newly-acquired camera kit in hand, looking for something I could make a good image from. That was the wrong term at the time though: I thought of it as ‘going out to take a photo’. I wasn’t remotely considering the possibilities of post-processing it once I’d ‘taken it’, and I wasn’t thinking of ‘capturing light’ or ‘making an image’. As a direct result of that, this photo has improved through its various incarnations as I’ve learned how to process files better – at least, I think it has… That, I feel, will be another theme of this blog: my development in technique and approach, as I progressed through the stages of making images and, I hope, of my continued progression. I started by just heading out with a camera, and now I tend to try to pre-visualise images and then go out looking for landscapes which I can use to make what I’m looking for.

Back to this image then. I’d headed up onto Twisleton Scar End, somewhere I’m reasonably sure I’d never been before, since I knew that there were both limestone pavement and a few trees up there, and thought that they must be good to ‘take photos of’. Having wandered around looking at all the trees, taking the odd shot (well, quite a lot of odd shots in fact; none of them terribly good), I decided that this tree was the best of the bunch. I’d then taken endless images of it from all directions, none of which looked especially gripping on the LCD screen of my Nikon D90. I proved myself right there; they weren’t.

Then, just as I had put everything back in the bag, turned away from the tree, and started to walk back down to the car across the tricky limestone pavement, the sun suddenly emerged from the cloud behind which it had been lurking and made me flinch away from the glare. Doing so, I could see that the rather drab tree I’d spent the previous half hour looking at was now glowing with light; completely transformed! Now, a year or so later, I know how suddenly things change, and I know how much difference that makes to an image; then, despite years on high mountains, I didn’t appreciate either the drama or the speed with which this can happen. I attribute this lack of realisation before to the fact that, slogging up some alpine peak, I’ve tended to focus rather more on where my feet and axe are going than on the delicate play of light on the snow and other, more artistic, features of the terrain!

I quickly pulled the camera out, half knelt down, rested an elbow on a knee for stability, and took half a dozen shots before the rain started and the sun disappeared again. This was the best. More precisely, this was the one which was in focus and didn’t show much camera movement! Taken as a jpeg, it was quite dramatic, but not as good as I’d hoped. It’s improved since then; I’ve reprocessed it around three or four times, going back and tweaking the files each time I learnt something new about post-processing. The best version is that I’ve posted here I think; I like the extra foreground compared to the more elongated version necessary for the blog banner.

This has been a thoroughly educational image for me. Whilst taking it, I learnt the importance of predicting the light and of using a tripod. Since then, I’ve learnt how much difference can be made from careful processing, as well as the fact that having a RAW format version in the first place would have helped a great deal. I’m rather hoping I won’t modify it again from now on, but there’s always the option. Do comment to let me know if you think it could be improved!

A larger version of this image can be seen here on my Flickr stream.