Peak District Pitstop
Last week there was a work team event held in Manchester over a couple of days and, seeing that it’s not an area of the country I ordinarily find myself in, I decided to take the scenic route home. I haven’t been to the Peak District since Laura and I visited a good few years back and now I have a terrible habit of thinking that things don’t take as long as they actually do so naturally I imagined I would be able to squeeze in a bunch of different places and still be home for dinner..not the case. I made it to one location out of six which on reflection was enough, time flies when you’re having fun and I spent a good bit of time wandering around taking photos.
Needless to say I’m no landscape photographer, I could blame my equipment and make excuses about not having the right focal length or whatever but truthfully I just don’t have the patience to compose complicated scenes. My strength lies in simple scenes without too much distraction which, arguably, is what makes a good landscape image in my opinion. However there’s often just so much going on in a scene that I’m overwhelmed and just end up pointing the camera in the general direction of something vaguely interesting and leaning on the crop tool later on to reframe and realise I should’ve framed it entirely differently. For these photos I abandoned my usual 4:3 ratio and went for a 16:9, lets just pretend I have an expensive wide angle set up..
Old habits die hard, subject dead centre and the horizon lined up with the top third of the frame, I’ll blame my lack of imagination for not doing anything wild. For better or for worse I’m definitely fixed in a way I like to compose which is good in the sense that I find most of my images looks similar leading to some degree of consistency. Not so good when you maybe want to try something a bit different but it’ll end up being too much of an outlier and that’s just simply too much to handle. I did however take a photo of a cinder block, wrapped up in some long grass..subject dead centre..doh.
I neglected to edit out the van that was parked on the road below in this one but extra points for including a bin right? I’ve been watching some videos by James Popsys recently and he also shares a fondness for bins, amongst other ordinary subjects which is fun to see in the swathes of samey videos on Youtube. I sometimes ponder of the idea of doing some photography videos, ignoring the fact that I do my best to avoid speaking in front of any kind of audience and imposter syndrome and me are best pals, still, maybe the world needs some more banal-ness.
Is there a photo here? Who knows, some nice shapes and tones though. If in doubt, black and white right..?
My mission for the coming months is, as always, to be more consistent with my blog posts. I’m on the cusp of ditching Instagram all together to preserve what’s left of my mental heath, so perhaps that’ll be the push I need to feed more energy into this website which I pay for but make zero income from. Still, better than pouring my time into a toxic app..I feel a blog post coming on. It would also be great to see other photographers of similar genres get into doing some longer form posts about their work, images and thoughts and feels, currently I read Lloyds Blog which is great and he’s doing a much better job of posting on a regular basis than myself. Fog Dog is blog goals, not necessarily my kind of photos but the near daily posts keep me coming back.
If anyone else has some good blogs to follow, let me know!