If you follow me on social media ( and a big thank you if you do!) then you may recall that I posted this image in November 2020. I had waited for a good few years to get the perfect conditions to create this image. Why had it taken so long? Well the sun is only in this position for about 4 weeks every year. You then need to get the perfect amount of fog on the moors to create the silhouette as you are shooting directly into the sun. As you can image the chances of it happening become slimmer and slimmer. However, thankfully I did get the perfect conditions and I was able to tick off one of my bucket list images from across the North York Moors.
Sadly, it will never be possible to create this image again. You see the tree on the right hand side of the image, lost about a 3rd of its hight in one of the recent storms that we have experienced this winter and the branches at the top of the tree on the left have all but vanished. It was a sad sight to see but I am so pleased that mother natures gave me one chance to capture the image and that I took advantage of the conditions.
Thats the great and sometimes sad thing about landscape photography, we never know when a composition may be lost forever, our landscapes are changing all of the time. Sometimes it is nature that shapes what we can see and on other occasions the changes are man made. These changes were further highlighted on a recent trip to the Lake District, so many wonderful old tress were destroyed by Storm Arwen and iconic landscapes locations have been changed forever. I amnestying sure this has been repeated across all of the country. I was listening to the BBC local news this morning and it is estimated that over 1 million trees were lost during the same storm.
At home I have a list of about 30 images that I would like to take across the North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland National Parks. I have photographed all of these locations before but never in the prefect conditions. None of them are simply compositions that I can turn up and take when we get a decent sunrise, sunset, fog, snow etc. They will only ever work when a number of elements all come together. The majority of them will only work for the briefest of periods of time during the year. Fingers crossed I may get to tick a few more of the list over the coming 12 months, but if I don't then I will keep on checking the conditions and weather until the perfect day arrives.
When you do get "the image" it is so rewarding and it is one of the reasons why I love landscape photography so much. When the location changes for ever or the subject is lost, the memory and composition to me becomes priceless.
留言