Tuesday 22 January 2013

Blea Tarn Storm Front (Langdales Vertorama), Lake District

This is a three shot vertorama of Blea Tarn, on National Trust land in the Langdales. It's another shot from my rainy day up in the Lake District over Christmas. Having driven up from Great Langdale I spent three or four hours up at the tarn, watching the light scroll across the landscape.

Assaulted by rain, sleet and hail, I had a heavy duty sandwich bag taped around my lens hood and back over the whole body and tripod. All good fun.

Two hours in there was a brief break in the rain, and a couple of minutes patchy golden light, then a sudden grey slide into darkness. This is from that moment. Originally I was set up just for the Langdales and the tarn, but when the colours appeared higher in the sky, I thought I'd have a go at a vertorama. That was created manually, first blending two exposures of the sky by hand, then cutting out the distant shore and dropping in the lake. Finally a manual "perspective" adjustment hopefully did the job of making the water look natural. The hardest thing was holding back thereafter - the colours are pretty much as shot.

If you want to see some proper vertoramas, I'd suggest you check out Peter Ribbeck's incredible photostream. He's a classy chap and his landscape photography is relentlessly breathtaking.

Hope everyone is having an amazing week so far!