Last weekend, I went on a long-planned hike and camp from Seathwaite to Sprinkling Tarn with my daughter, Sophie.  The original plan was to make the trip in May/June, but for many reasons, that didn’t happen.  We have had a long and very hot summer this year, but it’s been quite cold for the past few weeks and a more sensible person would probably have postponed the trip until next year.

Chris Sale kindly offered to meet us on Saturday morning to take some photos around Tarn Hows before we set off.  

Chris is a really nice bloke who who has a YouTube photography channel and he’s just as friendly and helpful in person as he is on his channel.   His video of the morning is here.

We met at 0730, before sunrise and got set up to take what is probably a classic shot of the Tarn.  We waited for sunrise, but the sky didn’t really do much.

Chris and I had a good chat as we wandered around the Tarn, it was a rare treat for me to spend time with a real photographer.

We were, however, struggling to find any good compositions due to the sky being a bit dull.  I did see a couple of trees which were turning red with autumn colours and stood out against a background of green pines.  The compositions weren’t great, but they did look pretty.

At this point, I had a major camera malfunction, which started displaying “Err” and not taking any photos.  I tried all of the usual – remove the battery, remove the memory cards, etc – without any success.  In the end, it seems that the mirror may have stuck and a little knock followed by taking a photo fixed the problem.

After that “excitement”, I took a photo of a similar tree at the other side of the tarn.

I has planned on taking this as a long exposure, but completely forgot to after the broken camera, so I had a go a simulating the effect in Photoshop.  This was achieved by duplicating the photograph on a new layer, adding some Gaussian blur and using a layer mask to only add the effect over the water. 

After this, we carried on walking around the Tarn and then went our separate ways.

Sophie and I went to get some breakfast/lunch before driving to Seathwaite for our hike.

To be continued…

You can see Sophie’s photos here.