Ingleton Waterfalls

Location Map

This is what this trip has been about... I'd booked this 'experience' session with http://www.experienced-seminars.co.uk/ a few months back and have been looking forward to this ever since...

After my brief visit to Shrewsbury on the way up I arrived at Ingleton at about 9pm and thanks to TomTom it placed me in the centre of the village using the B+B's postcode. This was slightly unfortunate since the B+B isn't in the centre; after not noticing that the village is essentiallly one big one way system [I wondered why the lady at the church gate was staring at me, just staring] I gave in and phoned them.

The proprieter, Andrew Foley of Riverside Lodge, answered and kindly talked me in and met me at the gate, apparently it's not unusual for TomTom to put thier postcode a mile up the road in the village centre... great!

After briefly unpacking, and ensuring that I'd got internet connection [isn't that sad] I visited the Craven Heiffer Inn just up the road [still not as far as dear old TomTom had dropped me mind you] and tucked into a Pate starter and a half chicken road for main. Convincing myself that I'd need all my energy for the walk tomorrow I treated myself to a ginger cake and custard dessert. This was a nice little pub.

Bright and early next morning, Monday 12 October, I was up and ready to be on my way. After a hearty full english breakfast, ably cooked by Mr Foley, I was off to the falls. Not being sure about the parking arrangements I thought I'd risk it and drive from the B+B.

Delighted to find that TomTom didn't have the falls in its database I thought I'd follow the road signs, but in my excitement at villages one way system twice managed to miss the huge sign that directed me to it because it was competely hidden by virtually the one shrub in along the road that was big enough and with enough leaves... what gives!!

On the third passing, head spinning from continual clockwise travel, I managed to spot it and veared off down the little side street [where the sign should have been] and over the bridge into the car park.

It was only 930am and I was third in the queue. After a few moments wait I turned off the engine of my clattery diesel and waited; there seemed to be some tooing and froing of the gate attendants and the front car. Eventually we were underway again and after explaining that I was an 'experience-seminar photography deligate' I was ushered through to find that I was in the same party as the front two cars. I met with Nena [spelling?], Brian [both tutors from Experience-Seminars] and my first colleague 'Andy'.

While the weather was bright and sunny [apparently not great for waterfall photography] we all looked forward to the opening of the cafe at 10am. By then there were about 18 or so of us and we'd been chatting about our journey's up and where we stayed and the like.

By 11am we been briefed on our journey, which they kept stressing was going to be quite hard work at a 'level 6, the highest level they do' and were off to the minibus to take us half way up where upon we'd walk the rest of the way and then back down the remaining few miles from the other direction.

Our first waterfall was Beezely Falls. 18 or so of us decended upon this narrow footpath and promptly caused minor mayhem as we all sprouted 18 tripods... I decided to take a walk slightly further down to the second falls in the hopes that I'd have a clear view of our intended subject rather than a host of legs, tripods and bobbing bodies.

This was quite a difficult shot because the foreground waterfall was in direct sunshine while the back ground [the falls in the distance] was very much in the shade.

After a bit of fiddling around and learning how to use my new ND8 grad [Neutral Density gradual density filter] I found that I needed two of them to try and balance out the contrast front to back. I also used a polariser in an attempt to reduce some of the reflections. You can see more picture from this session by clicking on the photograph which will take you to my flickr account.

When I returned to the group a little later I chatted to Nena [our experience-seminar guide - her business] about the settings on my 1Dmk3. It seems that I'd been misunderstanding shade and cloudy, or at least Canon's interpretation of it... from now on shade is when there is no specular light entering the scene.. like when we're in a tunnel, while cloudy is when we're under a tree canopy and there is specular light getting through.

Fortunately I'd been shooting in raw and so I was able to recover this later on the PC; previously the shot above was for the bin as it looked nasty and brown as the camera processor desparately tried to 'correct' the image from the two ND grad filters, after changing to cloudy and tweaking the exposure slightly this was the result... much better. You'll notice the water is brown in places.. and it really was quite brown... peat apparently.

I also leant that the 1Dmk3 landscape function [which tweaks the colours as the file is saved] is better for jpg files than for raw, which sort of makes sense since raw is really to enable us to develop the photo on the PC, where as jpg is more ideal for creating the shot in-camera. So from now on apparently I should be using either faithful or neutral for when i'm shooting raw. Grief... why can't we have a camera that simply records what we see without all this annoying fiddling internally which also seems to me trying to fudge the picture... ho hum, guess I should have bought a point a shoot rather than this beast then...

With my new knowledge I had another go at creating an image and ended up with these two: