Bridge over Brook near Alston
Photo of the Day
Last November, we stayed at one of the cottages at the Lovelady Shield Country House a couple of miles from Alston where our alarm clock was only the cows mooing in a nearby field. It was our base for exploring the Hadrian’s Wall and its surroundings, but I didn’t have to go far from the cottage to get a good view.
This bridge spanned a small brook that crossed the property and was only a few short steps from the hotel. The swirling current made for a great pattern in this long exposure as the sun sat low in the sky.
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Staward Gorge at Allen Banks
Photo of the Day
I was looking for a photo that might be a bit more Christmasy to take us into the heart of the holiday season, but my more recent photo expeditions haven’t been to any frost-covered landscapes or snowy scenes, so we’ll have to content ourselves with something autumnal.
This image comes from Walks Woods at Allen Banks and features the fall colours flanking the river flowing through Staward Gorge.
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Hadrian’s Wall at Hotbank Crags
Photo of the Day
Hadrian’s Wall rises and falls with the undulations of Hotbank Crags.
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Hadrian’s Wall at Housesteads
Photo of the Day
I took this picture only a few feet away from the previous photo of the day, but the effect of it is pretty different. In the cool, purple of dusk, this shot really emphasizes the line that Hadrian’s Wall follows along the crags.
The Roman builders of the wall knew what they were doing. As much as they could, they used the natural cliffs and steep slopes of the land to form the better part of their defence. When the wall you’re building spans the length of an entire country, you better make sure you use every shortcut you can.
It would have been quite a spectacle to behold in its original form, but even today, it’s an impressive sight.
One funny detail I only noticed after processing the image: All the black cows are on one side of the wall and the white sheep on another. Can’t we all just get along?
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Hadrian’s Wall Panorama from Housesteads Roman Fort
Photo of the Day
A brilliant, saturated sunrise rewarded my efforts to wake early and trek up the hill to get this classic shot of Hadrian’s Wall from near the Housesteads Roman Fort. I took plenty of shots from at or near this vantage point at various different times of the day, but I think this is my favourite. It captures both the detail of the wall and its snaking path along the crags while also showing some of the surrounding countryside bathed in a light that had me applauding Mother Nature.
I’ve now managed to process a few shots from this trip as well as more from the earlier visit to Scotland, so those will trickle through in the next the next little while and I’ll try to show off images from some of the top landscapes in the UK.
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Manchester Exchange Square Panorama
Photo of the Day
Today’s image is from my current home city, Manchester and features Exchange Square and the Manchester Wheel in the evening.
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Millstone at Padley Gorge
Photo of the Day
The millstones randomly scattered around Northern England’s Peak District captivate me. These weathered stones all probably have some story attached to them and who knows if anyone remembers just how they got where they are.
This mysterious stone rests beneath a picturesque tree near the edge of Padley Gorge on the Longshaw Estates National Trust property.
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Ruin above Dovestones
Photo of the Day
This shot is another from a little walk I recently did on the edges above Dovestones reservoir in Lancashire. As I crested the rise, this tiny, ruined house and the accompanying lovely view greeted me at the top.
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Padley Gorge in Longshaw Estates
Photo of the Day
On the way back from our most recent trip to Lincoln, we stopped at Longshaw Estates, a beautiful National Trust property that provides extensive opportunities for walkers to have a good stroll.
I immediately headed for the confines of Padley Gorge and peaty water cascading over mossy stones while emerald branches swayed overhead. There I found a few photo ops including the scene below.
I’ll definitely have to go back and spend a longer time there and I’m guessing it’s a pretty fine place to be when autumn arrives.
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Lincoln Cathedral Panorama
Photo of the Day
In the past few months, I’ve been through Lincoln twice now and this is one of the many shots I’ve taken of its towering cathedral. I kept gravitating towards this particular view of the great building from a spot between the cathedral and the castle.
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Bodmin Moor’s Cheesewring
Photo of the Day
The Cheesewring is a rock formation sitting atop the barren hill of Stowes Hill in Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. According to good-old Wikipedia, it’s named after a cheesewring, “a press-like device that was used to make cheese.”
Almost unbelievably, this is a natural formation. No ancient astronauts came down to pile these giant stones onto one another – this is all the result of weathering. The hill has a few other strange formations like this one and there’s a stone circle not too far away as well.
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Chesterton Windmill
Photo of the Day
Here’s another one of my experiments in using a single flash to light a scene in dozens of separate photos later combined. This one is of the Chesterton Windmill which stands by itself in a field not too far from Stratford-upon-Avon.
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Stanage Edge Millstones
Photo of the Day
These abandoned millstones sit at the base of Stanage Edge in Derbyshire near the village of Hathersage. Stanage Edge makes for a good walk with nice views of moors on one side and hills on the other, but these millstones are what captivated me.
Millstone manufacturing was a burgeoning industry in the Peak District in the 19th century and these stones are most likely a leftover from one of the factories in the area, long since shut down.
For me, there was something wonderfully mysterious about them. There was no evidence of any other structure around them – just the stones – so you naturally ask the question of how they got there.
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Ely Cathedral Window
Photo of the Day
This west-facing window on the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral caught the light of the descending sun in an extraordinary way. The whole window seemed to be set ablaze for a few moments as the sun neared the horizon. I’ve tried to capture just how bright the light looked, but I’m not sure a photograph can show just how brilliant it was.
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Castle Drogo Panorama
Photo of the Day
On travels in the south of England, Drogo Castle’s fortified exterior and fascinating interior (no photos allowed, unfortunately) made for an enticing stop.
This image is of the front entrance to the castle. It was a bit of a tricky shot to put together as it’s a panoramic HDR shot. I shot five bracketed exposures for each segment of the panorama, put together the HDR images then stitched the panorama. It’s all rather time consuming, but the results can be worthwhile.
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Trinity Lane in Cambridge
Photo of the Day
On a recent trip to Cambridge, the late-afternoon light was providing a brilliant backlight to the pedestrians passing through Trinity Lane. It would have been a nice enough shot without anyone in the scene, but I was sure that if I could wait for the right person to pass, the image would have a lot more interest to it.
Fortunately for me, before the light shifted and faded, the right person did indeed come along and the photo below is the result.
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Tatton Park Japanese Garden Panorama
Photo of the Day
Nope, it’s not Japan. Not even in Asia. This panoramic photo comes to us from the tranquil Japanese garden nestled within the greenery of Tatton Park. Visiting it made me pine for some more travels in Japan.
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Deserted Mancunian Way
Photo of the Day
Manchester’s city centre is surrounded by the Mancunian Way, a sometimes-raised motorway that consistently hums with a steady flow of traffic. It’s rare to find an hour of the day when there isn’t at least an automotive trickle passing along the road.
The photo below might then make you wonder what I was thinking by wandering out into the middle of one of the city’s busiest streets. Well, it wasn’t busy that morning – once or twice a year, road crews block off all traffic and perform maintenance. On just such a morning, I was able to wander along the now-clear street to do a bit of cityscape photography.
Despite knowing that I was essentially alone on the strip of road, my body remained tensed at being in a place it normally shouldn’t be. I feel like this shot was worth a bit of unease…
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Stonehenge Panorama
Photo of the Day
A fiery sunset creates a silhouette of Stonehenge.
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St. Michael’s Mount Sunset Panorama
Photo of the Day
The fairy tale island of St. Michael’s Mount is awash with colour on a gorgeous evening in Cornwall.
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Lyme Park Panorama
Photo of the Day
Tranquil Lyme Park seems to be a favourite of just about every British girl who grew up watching the Pride and Prejudice miniseries on the BBC. The thought of Mr. Darcy emerging from this pond after a swim still causes dramatic swoons years after it was filmed here.
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Godrevy Point Panorama
Photo of the Day
I was recently inspired by a client of mine to gather together a number of my panoramic images and now I have a bunch in handy web-size format, I thought I would share some of them. For the next little while, we’ll have a bit of a panorama-rama.
The first installment comes from Godrevy Pont in Cornwall where I caught a few young lads’ fun as the sun started its descent. The cold waters didn’t deter them from using the rocks as diving boards into the ocean and its their frolicking that makes this photo for me.
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Stonehenge at Sunset
On the way back from Cornwall, Stonehenge was too enticing a detour to pass up. A night in a little roadside motel about a mile away from the ancient rocks allowed for easy access at sunset and a quick trip up the road to be first in line for the morning opening.
I’ve met some people that dismiss Stonehenge’s value as a destination, but I couldn’t help but be impressed. Seeing so many photos of a place can rob it of its majesty or diminish a visitor’s sense of wonder upon seeing the real deal, but that didn’t seem to happen to me. I mean, these are some huge rocks! I’m not sure how you couldn’t be sucked in by this ancient wonder.
The brilliant sky behind the silhouetted stones was shot was taken from across the field outside the fence with a long lens. As seems to be a trend with me lately, this is a composite of a few shots – just a vertical panorama in this case. I could have done this in one shot, (and I think I probably did on other frames), but this one comes out at a higher resolution than I would have gotten otherwise, so if anyone wants to buy a Stonehenge-sized print of this one, it should turn out nicely!
St. Michael’s Mount Panorama
This will be the third Photo of the Day in a row that goes to St. Michael’s Mount and that’s just because the place is so cool!
It’s a castle on an island, just off the coast and it’s the stuff of fantasy novels. ‘Nuff said.
This shot was a bit more difficult to put together than most panoramas. I wanted to try to capture the bright sunset that was occurring in the right-hand side of the shot while getting the blue of the ever-darkening evening that was happening on the left.
The range of stops in the whole scene was too wide for one exposure, so I did a bracket of five shots for each component shot of the panorama in order to be able to catch all the lights and darks and worried about how to put it together later.
When it came time to put everything together, I had all the component parts I wanted, but I really wasn’t sure what was going to be the best way to assemble it. I tried using the stitching software to put the HDR side of things together while simultaneously stitching together the panorama. Nope, it would have been far too easy for it to work in one, nicely-automated process. I’ve used that technique with a small degree of success in the past, but it was with a slightly more static scene inside a church. No moving water, shifting clouds or changing light to deal with.
On the next attempt, I tried to put together individual HDR shots and then stitch them together. That didn’t work because the lighting and colouring of the HDR shots came out too differently from one another for them to seamlessly blend. This occurred despite using all the same settings for every shot in the HDR processing. When processing HDR shots, I usually take a more manual, hands-on approach to avoid it all turning into a glowing surrealistic mess, but I didn’t think that was feasible with a panorama. There would have been too many differences between each image again.
So, the next step I took was to process five different panoramas, one for each exposure bracket, then see if I could layer them together. This was what ended up producing the final shot, but it came with its own big challenge.
I only ended up using two of the exposures in the end. It was enough to catch the full range and it minimized my work a bit because the problem with using this technique is that the stitching software stitched each panorama differently. When stacked on top of each other, the differences were a bit more than slight. Good thing we have the handy dandy align-layers feature in Photoshop to help us through!
But that only got us part of the way down the road. After all that, I was still left with a tedious bit for retouching when it came to finishing off the alignment and blending of the two images. With a bit of patience, it was eventually finished off for a decent result.
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Darby Sawchuk is a Canadian-born photographer who currently resides in Manchester, England. He has travelled to over 40 countries and is always adding more to the list. He creates stock for multiple agencies and is available for assignments.
+44 0790 992 8932
