Over 4 months since the my last blog post and in that time I’ve managed to get out just once briefly (to the Lake District) with friends for the day while we were allowed and apart from that hardly at all with the camera with any real sense of purpose.
Living in Wigan doesn’t by default provide me with many local options for Landscape Photography, at least not the sort I like anway. But, when you don’t have a choice (due to Covid Lockdown) you can either not do any at all or start to really try hard to look around and shoot something local.
A couple of times lately the weather conditions have been suitably dramatic (including a very rare cloud inversion) so some local scenes which would normally be quite ‘average’ suddenly became far more interesting, and very photogenic. I found myself actively scouting local locations more and making a list of what weather would suit them best, so that if it did happen I would be ready to go out and have a spot in mind instead of aimlessly driving around looking for something.
I guess the one and only reason I’ve never done this before is because quite simply, I didn’t have to, I’m an hour away from some great locations in all different directions and I taken for granted that I’d never have that option of going to them removed by something like this. I’ve found an abandoned railway viaduct just 5 minutes drive and a short walk from my house that has the most amazing icicles growing on trees underneath it in freezing weather, a great spot suited to macro work, various new footpaths and routes that lens themselves well to Winter Photography, and a location that’s great for Winter sunsets. If you’re anything like me and you’re getting extremely frustrated by the current situation, and maybe you too live in a mostly urban area, don’t give up, just try and get out and find new things, the chances are very high that you will, and even if you don’t get the weather you need on that visit you can be confident that when you do, you know exactly where to go.
Here are a few of the images taken locally during lockdown, shot on both Nikon D850 and Phantom 4 Drone.
You never know what’s all around you until you look a bit harder… Hope to see you all back out there soon…
Pete