Sunday 13 January 2013

Kettle Crag & Redacre Gill (Langdale Panorama), Lake District

Via Flickr:
For some proper Lake District landscapes, you should check out Tom Eversley.

Over Christmas I had one day up in the Lakes whilst my wife and JSH were with family in Blackpool. Needless to say it thrashed down with rain and hail all day long! I like to think rain brings out the best in the Lakes, however. It clears fells, trails, roads and car parks of all the lightweights. Whilst they're holed up in Keswick or Ambleside buying that essential Northface cagoule or Leki walking pole, the landscape comes alive with bubbling streams and waterfalls, and the air gurgles with a fresh, cold purity lost to the average man.

This a panorama heading up out of Great Langdale to the end goal of Blea Tarn. It's rather haphazardly threaded together from 14 handheld exposures in Photoshop - the output file, once flattened, was a hilarious 781Mb. I then used content aware fill for the corners, then cloned then into shape. The result looked like something from a CIA drone or weather balloon, so I subjected the whole scene to a pretty brutal manual "warp" to bring some emphasis back into the scene.

I then played with the levels left to right to try to express the hard shadow of the rain front as it swept in again. Not entirely successful, but fun.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend.