Trips - Part 1: The Yorkshire Dales and a 1 on 2 Workshop
As I explained in the pre-trip blog post, our trip began with a drive across The Netherlands and a ferry trip to Newcastle. Given it was an afternoon departure, and, even driving at the restricted 80 kph permitted in The Netherlands for the bimobil, it would take less than 2 hours to get from Didam (8 km or so from the German border) to IJmuiden (on the North Sea coast on the other side of the country). That meant we had an easy morning - full breakfast, plenty of time for last minute packing, and the start of a new audio book for the trip. We still arrived early (even after a fuel stop to fill up the tank), and were second in line for vehicle loading behind a couple of Dutch classic car drivers who looked to be going to a meet-up in the UK. At 1:00 DFDS started checking us in and put us in separate lanes.
The bimobil may be big, but nothing compared to the size of the ferry.
After about an hour wait beside the ship, we started boarding and drove the bimobil into the hull of the ship. We grabbed our carry bags and took them up to our cabin. We of course would never go anywhere without at least our point and shoot cameras, so after we got set up in the cabin (a window-less small bunk-bed space), we decided to explore the ship to see if there was anything we’d be interested in. The elevation from the upper stories gave us a nice view of the port area immediately surrounding our ship.
But the views were pretty much what we’d expected. So, since this was a photography trip, I decided to start with a bit of warm-up on the trip over. Nothing too serious, just a little exercising of the eye and brain and some photography to remove myself even further from a work mindset. We were on vacation!
As we walked around the exterior of the ship we’d stop to take a photograph here and there. As it was a bit windy and chilly, it wasn’t long before we headed inside.
As a last-minute addition, I signed us up for dinner on the ship. While it was stupidly expensive, it was a decent meal and we had a nice window seat. Which was very convenient as we passed a windmill farm, well on our way to England.
I won’t comment on the accommodations - that was one of my gripes in the gripes blog.
The next morning found us nearing the coast of England with cold, wind and rain. Things looked bleak as we drove out of Newcastle and headed south-west to the Yorkshire Dales. Fortunately, the rains eventually stopped and the the last part of the route I’d selected (a one-lane road it turned out) was beautiful. Luckily, it was across open, rolling hills where visibility was good and the few opposing cars we came across gave us plenty of time to locate a pull-out.
I had planned an itinerary of waterfall locations for our few days in the Yorkshire Dales, with a couple of potential sites located near the farm where we were going to camp the first night. As we approached the town where I’d located a nice public parking lot big enough for the bimobil on Google maps, I realized that the road into town was walled on both sides and looked to be . . . maybe 8 feet wide (there are signs throughout England warning of 6’-6” width clearances on some roads). I decided caution was better than valor and passed by the turn, deciding to continue on the road we were on wondering if we could even get into the town. Fortunately, on that road was a lodge and in front of it, pull out parking spots. I spoke to a wonderful woman who was out for a walk. She told me it was fine for me to park there for a few hours and, no, we never would have made it through either of the roads that entered the town. She also warned me that they’ve had a lot of rain, and there had been slides on the trail leading to the second set of falls I’d planned to visit, with several people having serious accidents (read: needing emergency medical assistance) trying to get to those falls. It always helps to talk to a local about not only where to go, but where to avoid.
So we grabbed our gear and walked the half mile or so into town (off to the right in the photo above), and then the quarter mile or so more to the first set of falls. What the kind woman had to say about rain was true. The river was rushing and the falls were raging. Generally, raging falls are not very attractive - impressive yes, photogenic no. So we walked a bit along the river until Ann found a rowan tree she wanted to photograph. As she was doing her thing, I looked around a bit and decided to make my own image.
That’s when I began to appreciate how windy it still was - the day’s rain might have stopped, but not the wind. Ann and I faced the same dilemma. To freeze the tree branches, one had to use a very fast shutter speed - which made the water look ugly. Slow down the shutter speed so the water looks ok, then you get blurry branches. I decided to not only go with the latter approach, but to push it adding a neutral density filter to make the exposure time even longer so that there would be clear, intentional blurring of several of the foreground tree branches.
I’m not sure it totally works, but it’s better than the other images, and one learns through experimentation like this.
Often, winds portend changing weather - good or bad. In this case it meant that, after photographing down by the river for about an hour or so, by the time we’d hiked uphill to our vehicle, the clouds were starting to break. The Yorkshire Dales are characterized by lovely rolling hills, and the breaking clouds gave us a taste of how lovely they can be. At a farm a few hundred yards before we reached the bimobil there was a spot that offered us a lovely view of what this landscape is like and how beautiful the light can be in England. We thought it glorious that we will have light like this on our trip. Little did we realize, that day would be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule that weather in England can suck.
A short drive from our stop found us at our first campsite for the night at a lovely sheep farm. It was a pretty good first-day introduction to England.
The second day was, photographically, a bust - though it wasn’t a waste of a day. This was so for a number of reasons. First, the poor night of sleeping on the ship had taken its toll and we both felt we needed to sleep in. We didn’t feel too bad about it because it was heavy overcast that morning, so we didn’t miss any beautiful light, teasing fog or lovely views. Plus, it gave us the opportunity to take a shower, which we would not have for the next couple of nights. Second, of all things, we’d forgotten our ice cube trays, so at some point in the day, we would have to make a trip to find a couple of trays that would fit into our refrigerator’s freezer. Third, we still swung by some waterfalls and found out that what I’d feared from the day before was true - the rivers were so flooded that the waterfalls were just torrents of water instead of a mixture of rocks and water that is so enjoyable to photograph. But all was not lost. We walked through a lovely village and had a great, traditional breakfast. It was my first introduction to a Full Cumbrian, which included incredible cumbrian sausage and black pudding. The village also had a waterfall that . . . confirmed that we needed to reassess potential photo locations for our Yorkshire Dales stay. We also had a couple of lovely drives through another part of the Yorkshire Dales (on our successful quest to find ice cube trays). The weather was overcast and gloomy, with bouts of rain and no sunshine, so we were content with taking it easy. By mid-afternoon we headed over to Ambleside in the Lake District where we were going to have our 1-day workshop with Simon Booth. Ambleside almost turned into a disaster when we pulled up to the Rugby Club (where we were planning to park for a couple of nights and eat dinner at their pub) only to find the gate locked. I asked one of the chaps working by the gate what’s up, and he explained they’ve closed it to do some work for the month. Fortunately, he suggested the in-town parking area (by the cricket club), which we found. Dinner wound up being Mexican tapas, which were quite good!
The next morning we drove up, in darkness (thank goodness) to meet with Simon near Blea Tarn. Once he saw the bimobil, he apologized for sending us up the road and said we’d figure a better way to get around for the day. Our request for the day’s 1 on 2 workshop was to work with him on intimate landscapes - closer (usually very close) images to be found while you’re out photographing. He said he chose Blea Tarn to start with because not only is it a place rich with intimate landscape images to be made, but it’s also a good grander landscape location as well. And, he said, that’s always a good way to get one’s photographic juices flowing (ok, not in those words).
We spent a couple of hours there with Simon pointing things out and explaining how he approaches image-making. Occasionally, I’d step away when I saw something near-by - often continuing to listen to the discussion between Ann and Simon. While I made the image below, they were just off to the left discussing (and ultimately rejecting) possibilities to be found floating in a small pool of water.
We returned to Ambleside, making a short photo stop along the way, to park the bimobil and have a quick lunch at a nice little cafe. We then headed out to a mining site, part of it active, a good part of it (the original mine area) being reclaimed by nature. It was rich with opportunities for more traditional imagery, and . . .
and more abstract, intimate images. Simon explained in detail some of the techniques he uses to, for lack of a better word, visually play with his camera to explore the intimate landscape. He also worked with Ann or me on crafting an image here or there looking over our shoulders and explaining how to achieve different renderings and effects by moving a hand-held camera in certain ways within surrounding ferns and bushes.
Not only is Simon an excellent photographer and teacher, he is a really nice person and we had a very engaging and enjoyable day with him.
We again spent the night in the Ambleside parking lot and early the next morning headed back to the Yorkshire Dales for a couple more days of photography. We opted to begin with a 4.4-mile hike up and around a river that had a series of waterfalls and for much of the way was wooded.
Early on we found a grouping of mushrooms on a log and spent a bit of time trying to find an appealing composition.
The woodland was bushier than we’d hoped, with few grand trees, so the woodland photography opportunities were few and far between on our hike. There were, however images to be made, to include one of the famous “money trees” where people hammer coins into an old tree trunk. Obviously, they’ve been doing it here for quite some time, given this is only the end of a branch trunk and the entire tree was covered in coins.
We eventually got to the first of the main falls. And although I was able to get to a nice location to make an image, the falls were rushing so furiously that it was impossible to capture any real flowing of the water because there was none. The best I could do was try to capture the force of the water as revealed in the pool at the bottom of the falls.
The hike kept climbing and the description of the hike was true to its word - A series of falls along a river that cut through a tight canyon. The biggest of the falls offered a better image, but is probably much more photogenic in the summer when the stream flow is lower, or a week or two earlier when the trees are in full fall leaf.
Little did we realize the actual change in elevation for the walk (in the UK they call a hike a walk - they are not necessarily easy. If you can “walk” up to the top of a mountain without using climbing ropes, it’s a “walk” regardless of the elevation change). I don’t mind steep slopes on a path, but there were several places where there were long stretches of steps, uneven in hight and not level, that really took their toll on the way up (and later, down).
We finally climbed out of the river canyon to then cross farmland. Lucky for us, some ingenious entrepreneur had set up an ice cream stand at the mid-point of the hike. Water may be good, but the ice cream was better. We needed it.
The skies broke a bit as we made our way across the hillside that connected the two canyons that were part of the loop trail. You can see why the Yorkshire Dales are criss-crossed with walking trails.
We then started our way down the second canyon. One would think it was an easier trip, but it had as many, if not more stairs than the first one (given the walls were even closer together and the decent even steeper). And while walking downhill on a graded slope is so much easier than uphill, the same is not true for steps - the beating you take from it is much worse. We were simply exhausted (did I mention that Ann’s Apple Watch informed us that we’d walked 7.1 miles the day before?) and passed up several potential photo opportunities (in many ways, this second canyon was more photogenic than the first with its rock outcroppings) due to exhaustion and time seeming to pass quicker than we’d anticipated. At one point I noticed a small slot to the side of the trail and, as much to take a break from descending stairs as to make an image, I went to explore it. I found it interesting enough to drop my pack and try to photograph it. Ann did the same (perhaps for the same reason) and we gave our legs a short break.
It was near the end of this hike where Ann pointed out the interesting rock wall that I tried to ignore, but couldn’t and yielded a very nice image included in the Photographs post.
We were exhausted from our hike, which took much longer than we’d expected, and drove to our campsite right away. We checked in, took showers and warmed up another of our pre-cooked meals before crashing for the night like a couple of old geezers.
We woke up to clear skies and sore bodies the next morning. Given how early it was in the trip, we opted out of any of the potential hikes … I mean walks … I’d researched (particularly given most were waterfall hikes) in favor of a drive through the south-western portion of the Yorkshire Dales. We took our time on the drive, stopping periodically to appreciate the views, walking through a small village and taking a few snapshots along the way. One of the things that impressed us about the area were the number of railroad viaducts you can find in the landscape. Some famous, some not so famous but, in the end, all very interesting. At one of them an information board explained that the plentiful number of viaducts was due to the fact that most areas had competing rail companies during the Industrial Revolution that ran on entirely separate lines, so many of the villages have two train stations. They do make interesting structures in the landscape
While we didn’t actively seek photographs, nothing stopped us from making an image or two when the opportunity presented itself. So long as it was within a few feet of the vehicle.
The Yorkshire Dales is, indeed, a lovely area worth visiting.
We only visited a few of the different Yorkshire Dales areas, but each has its own character and each offers a range of interesting landscapes and towns to visit.
We wish we could have spent more time there (and been in much better physical condition - time for a diet and a fitness routine), but it was always going to be a short stopping point for the main focus of the trip - Scotland and the Lake District.
The next day was going to be a long haul, almost to the Isle of Sky, and we called it a day so we could get another good night of sleep (our bodies thanked us for that).