photography

DECEMBER 2024 - 1839 AWARDS - NOMINEE AWARD / December 18, 2024 by Pete Rowbottom

I hadn’t enetered any competitions for quite a while but I got invited to submit to this one, glad I did as I’m pleased to say I was awarded with a Nominee Award, in this Years 1839 Awards Photographer of the Year in the Landscape Catagory.

Mardale Green Village revealed under Haweswater / October 14, 2021 by Pete Rowbottom

Mardale Green was a 17th-century farming village in Cumbria, it was evacuated in the 1930’s and most of the village was flattened by the Army then flooded, the area now forms what we know as Haweswater reservoir today in the Lake District. Normally, none of it can be seen but this year the water level in Haweswater has been that low (under 40% full) it has been revealed once more.

All that remains of it is a bridge, remains of an old church, a pub, and roads, the remains of which can be seen in these images, also this year the remains of large tree stumps appeared out of the water, the last time it was this visible was back some 26 years ago, in 1995.

All images ©peterowbottom2021

Aerial view of Haweswater showing the Village remains off to the left

Aerial view of the walls, that are in remarkably good condition!

©peterowbottom2021

Kosovo - Wartime Locomotive Graveyard / September 30, 2021 by Pete Rowbottom

Going back to the end of November 2019, And I find myself in the salubrious surroundings of a ‘Railway Graveyard’, in a suburb of Pristina, Kosovo. Granted, not your average holiday destination… but I don’t really do average. A very unusual place to visit, but I couldn’t miss this when in the Country, and as is usual on these types of things, it didn’t come without it’s challenges…

The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo that started 28 February 1998 and lasted until 11 June 1999. It was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. (Source: Wiki)

Due to most of the Railway Rolling Stock being impounded or destroyed by the Serbs durng the war, Kosovo ended up with numerous secondhand Locomotives and Coaches from other Railways in Europe, noteably 4 Nohab Loco’s from Norway, and Passenger Cars from Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Norweigan built, donated by Swedish Railways.

A lot of these now lie broken and will never run again, parts obviously being the main issue and lack of staff to keep a full maintenance regime going, lot’s of markings from the War still remian on the loco’s, The NATO symbol and KFOR (KFOR was a NATO-led international peacekeeping force) can be seen on numerous loco’s in these images.

Now as you would imagine this is still quite a sensitive Country and walking around a live railway installation with a camera and tripod isn’t the greatest idea but I’d already decided that it was worth a look and this would maybe the only time I would get to do it (see also earlier blog post on Sarajevo). I’d done my research before travelling and I had a pretty good idea of where it was, after getting a taxi out of town and being dropped off in the middle of a random housing estate we quickly found the railway lines and worked out where everything was, the easiest route to it seemed to be by just folowing the railway lines, whilst you could never do in Britain it isn’t a problem at all over here as every man and his dog just walks along the lines to get where they are going. Once at the Railway Depot the intention was to go and ask someone if it was OK if we took some pictures, explain we were from the UK and no threat to anyone, problem was there wasn’t a soul in any building, there was a loco running in one of the sheds but nobody about at all apart from one guy who appeared to be fixing a roof.

Luckily he spoke a little English and we managed to find out he didn’t actually work on the Railway and was just doing some odd jobs about the place, with this in mind I decided to just go and find the scrapyard area and get busy, I wasn’t getting this far and giving up on it.

A good hour or so was had photographing the old scrap Loco’s and exploring the lines of ex Yugoslavian vehicles, lots of which were adorned with all the war markings, we decided to head over to another shed where there appeared to be even more stuff hidden away, as we did a scruffy looking man just appeared out of nowhere and beckoned us to come over, he didn’t speak of word of English but the general jist of it was that we definitely shouldn’t be there and needed to leave immediately. My mate was more than willing to just leave but I still hadn’t finished and wanted to see the other bits so I got the roof repair guy to help us translate with this other ‘Security’ guy. To cut a long story short he was saying we needed permission off the Railways to be there and would need to leave so I said to the roof man here show him this, and handed him a railway pass for the neighbouring Country of Macedonia, he looked at it for a few moments, (obviously no idea what it was apart from the distinct railway logo stamped on it) and then declared that he was sorry he had asked us to leave and that we were now welcome to stay, furthermore he would show us around the place!! If you don’t try you don’t get….! another 30 mins or so were spent looking around different areas, and getting pics before we bid our new friend a good day and walked off back down the line to the deserted and seemingly forgotten station (pics below) to catch one of the only trains of the day back into Pristina.

Well hidden away, Ex Swedish Railways, this was thought to have been scrapped many years ago

Pre war ‘Yugoslavian Railways’ logo

Original Builders plate from Canada,1980

Often the only way to get onto the next line was to climb through gaps like these.

NATO & KFOR logo’s

All images ©PeteRowbottom2019 - not be used or reproduced without permission.

The Winter of Discontent.... Making the best of it. / January 27, 2021 by Pete Rowbottom

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

Cave Dwelling - A rather wet revisit to Dinorwic / September 16, 2020 by Pete Rowbottom

With the advent of Covid 19, travel has very much been restricted, and with it the photography options that come with travelling for imagery. Unusually for me to date (September 2020) I still haven’t been to the Lake District this year, although I’m looking to get up there really soon.

On the spare of the moment I decided to have a few days up in Snowdonia to revisit Dinorwic Quarry, and also to scout out some new locations, one great thing about Dinorwic is that it really does suit cloudy and wet weather, so if the dreaded rain should roll in you can still achieve some great images up there, well, at least sometimes you can, I got a lot more than I bargained for on the first day….

I had a couple of things I wanted to achieve on this visit, to a couple of caves that I had never visited before in the quarry, and also to get some shots with the drone I now own, now I am reasonably proficient with using it.. After checking the weather (which looked cloudy but dry) with big camera bag in tow, plus tripod, and the drone in it’s box, I set off towards the quarry once more. The caves are located to the rear of a gorgeous (and oddly coloured) pool called Dali’s Hole, upon arriving the pool was at a very high level on this visit due to the amount of rainfall that has occurred lately and the colour of it was incredible, a stark contrast to the dull hues of the slate quarry all around, only broken up by patches of colourful heather on the sides. I decided to set up for the first shot of the day, no sooner had I got set up it started to rain, not a lot at first, but enough to make it pointless shooting, so I figured I’d go to the caves and just wait for it to blow over….

I love exploring new places, and this location certainly has a ‘forgotten lost world’ feeling to it, here’s a few shots from inside the caves, the rain made for a great waterfall halfway in:

When I came to leave it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to go out as the route was precarious in places and the rain was now coming down sideways, coupled with a very strong wind and the fact I’d only have one hand free to grip onto rocks I decided to wait it out in the cave for a couple of hours as the forecast was saying it would clear then. I set about getting more detailed shots and lighting the inside of the cave with a panel light I carry. A few hours passed, if anything it had just got worse, I checked the weather again and it had now changed to being the same all day! not wanting to spend a full day in a cave I just headed out into it and got completely soaked, taking my time I eventually got back to the car absolutely soaking wet.

Photography wise, the rest of the day was a write off, so an afternoon was spent ‘planning’ with a few Pints and a (really superb) Curry later on. - if you like Indian food then try Spice of Llanberis if you are in town! I’ve been 3 times now and has been great every time - https://spiceofllanberis.com/

The following morning, there was an exceptional sunrise over Lyn Padarn, and I got to explore more of the quarry that I hadn’t visited before, including using the drone, I think I’ve probably done about 90% of it now, but no doubt there are many features that I will still find on upcoming visits.

A selection of images from the trip:

I’m going to try and get a map of the place together, this might take a while so bear with me, it really is an enourmous place, but with care can be visited without a map, exploring it is all part of the fun, very much a sense of discovery in many ways.

The use of Graduated ND filters in Landscape Photography. / June 12, 2019 by Pete Rowbottom

Graduated ND filters, ND grads, (or GND’s as I’ll call them for the benfit of this blog post), a great subject to stir up a discussion…

They serve one purpose, to darken one area of the image being taken, leaving the rest of the image untouched, 99% of the time this is the sky, as it’s 2-3 stops brighter than the land, they come in different strengths allowing you to darken the area by however much you need to stop it being too bright and becoming ‘blown out’ , giving you an overall balanced image. A brilliant bit of kit, but….

There are those who say they simply aren’t needed anymore with the advent of digital, you can apply GND’s in camera RAW, or you can bracket your images and blend them later on using numerous methods, taking darker exposures as required for the sky to again avoid it becoming blown out, and while I 100% agree that this does work perfectly well, and occasionally I’ll use these options if the need arises, but I’ll tell why I prefer to use them over the digital method. I talked a little about this in Birmingham, at the NEC Photography Show, a lot of people were interested in the angle I was coming from and said they hadn’t thought about it like that before, so I thought I’d write a blog post on it.

There are a few reasons why I choose to use GND’s.

Long Exposure Photography, (hypothetical scene) let’s say you are shooting a long exposure seascape for instance. You get your 10 stop filter on and you shoot the scene without a GND, you calculate an exposure time of 30 seconds and take your shot. In your shot the sky isn’t blown out but it’s at the limit on the right histogram of how far you can go before the sky starts to blow out., but the water in the sea doesn’t look right, it needs longer to smooth it right out. Now from this point you could easily take a few expsoures exposing the sea for longer and blend them later on, the one thing you cannot do is expose the sky for longer than 30 seconds as it will blow out, no matter what you do this IS going to happen. But what if I add a GND in PP later? sure it may recover some of the blown out area but why risk that? also if you ever seen a long exposure image with moving clouds dragging right across the scene you will know how beautiful they can be, and unless the clouds are moving very fast 30 seconds is not going to give you a lot of movement so the image will lack that ‘movement’ feel to it, The solution ? you will need to lengthen the entire exposure, doubling or maybe tripling the expsoure time to get those clouds moving right through the scene. This is only acheivable by by adding a GND, unless you’re happy to just fake it in PS later, which I’m not.

2. Less time in post production - why spend more time on an image than you have to, wrestling with a sky to get it back down to what it could already be in camera can be time consuming and in my opinion can also look poor if not done correctly, get it right in camera.

3. Envisaging your final scene in the field - going back to number 1 a little, you’ve shot your scene with your GND on, you’ve pushed the image as far as it can go you can now preview your shot image, lets say you now have beautful cloud movement, brilliant, you can see the preview of this now balanced exposure and how the clouds will look in each image, by blending images later or shooting images that will need digital expsoure adjustments later on in PP you miss this stage, so you really don’t know if you have come away with a great image until you get home, and if you’re at the other side of the world, or even a few hours drive away when you find out you’ve fluffed your shot when you had the chance, if you care, that’s going to really hurt!

These are obviously only my thoughts on the matter but I wanted to share my views on it since people were interested on my take on it. There’s nothing worse than knowing you ‘could’ have had that image !

Ambassador for NiSi and Fotopro UK / June 4, 2019 by Pete Rowbottom

Really pleased to announce that from today I will be a UK brand ambassador for NiSi Filters, and also a UK ambassador for Fotopro tripods, many thanks to Mark Andreas Jones for inviting me to be part of the team, really looking forward to working with you.

Here’s the link to the webpage - https://www.markandreasjones.com/copy-of-pete-rowbottom-ambassador

Here's an image I took using the Fotopro TL-64CL,LG-7R ball head. And Nisi S5 150mm system in Iceland.

Nikon D810 14-24 f/2.8, Nisi S5 150mm system, Fotopro TL-64CL,LG-7R ball head

Product test: K+F Concept 1-5 stop adjustable ND filter / May 9, 2019 by Pete Rowbottom

I’m a big fan of using filters and find them indispensable for my type of photography, slide in ND filters, ND Grads, Polariser, the list goes on, quite often when I go out I’ll have a bag full of filters and sometimes even 2 systems to cover a super wide lens.

However one thing I have never used (until now) is an adjustable screw in filter, they don’t tend to get very good press and for someone like me who uses a dedicated slide in filter system they really aren’t going to be much use, or so I thought….

K+F Concept asked me if I would be interested in trying out their new 1-5 stop adjustable screw in filter to see what I thought of it, I must point out that I’m not affiliated to or employed by K+F in any way, and as such agreed to give an honest an unbiased view.

The first thing that strikes you about this product when it arrives it that is really does seem to be good quality, well packed in a stylish box, and it comes with a great sealed and padded hard protective case that will take some abuse outdoors, the filter itself seems very well made and the rotating movement of the outer element is extremely smooth and easy to use.

As with anything the proof is in the testing and I took it out on 2 recent trips with me to North Wales, and The Lake District.

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Actual Usage

A big issue with variable filters can be a dark ‘X’ mark evident in images where the the polarised light is at opposite ends of the filter, K+F say that is not the case with this filter and indeed it is a direct selling point on the website. In the images I took I found this to be the case, no signs whatsoever of any X (or other mark) from minimum filtration right through to maximum.

The other issues normally you could expect with many screw in filters is vignetting (darkening of the edges of the frame) on wide angle lenses, this is a very slim filter but even so I wanted to see how it performed on the Nikon 16-35mm lens on a full frame camera, 16mm on full frame is really the widest you will be able to go without requiring specialist equipment to mount any kind of filters to your lens, again the filter performed admirably with no vignetting at all - very useful and another box ticked.

Although they have many uses, as a mainly outdoor photographer, for me, ND filters in the range of 1 to 5 stops have 1 main use, water movement. This is where this filter comes into it’s own and I found it great to use, ideally with moving water where I want to show movement (but retain detail in the water) I will be looking for an exposure time of around 0.8 - 2 seconds, any longer and I would be looking for a 6-10 stop filter. The beauty of this filter is that you can easily compose your shot with the filter in place, focus with the filter in place, then simply turn it until you get your desired shutter speed, should you need to change your shutter speed for different effects in the water there’s no need to mess around removing filters and trying other ones - it’s simply a small turn of the filter. In fact it’s so easy there’s no reason not to take shots using different speeds to select later or even to combine for different areas of the final image where water flow may differ in the scene. With 1-5 stops you are not going to see much cloud movement in the sky at most times of day, which is why I say this filter is best suited for moving water images.

Colour - sometimes with ND filters you will get a colour cast to the images, I didn’t have a problem with this one at all, if anything there was maybe a slight warmth but if you are shooting in RAW it isn’t a problem anyway and so easy to correct, however I didn’t feel the need do any correction.

Conclusion and thoughts

I think this is a great little bit of kit, and I say little as that’s exactly where it’s strength is, even in the filter case it’s so easy to just slip into your jacket pocket, I often shoot in the middle of rivers or streams and going back and forward to the riverbank if you need to change filters can be troublesome, as can applying or changing over filters in the water, not to mention the chances of dropping and breaking them on rocky areas. With this one I can simply apply it to the camera before I take it out of the bag and that’s that done..

Another occasion in the Lakes I had a very small amount of time to capture an image I had spotted, the set up with this filter was so quick it allowed me to get the shot, something I wouldn’t have had time to do with a full filter system setup. A fellow photographer who was in the Lakes with me also had a variable ND with him which he uses on his vlogging video camera, we compared the 2 filters side by side and it was clear that this one was far better.

There will be times where this filter isn’t suitable for images I’m taking, for instance where I want to combine or ‘stack’ filters like a polariser and ND grads as this will start to introduce vignetting, but that’s not a problem as I don’t see it as a replacement for my other filters, but I do see it as a great solution where I need a travel filter, where I’m walking long distances and need to travel very light, and as mentioned before where I have very limited time and need a super quick setup, I honestly can’t fault it, and for the price ( around £50) it will be a great addition to anyone’s camera bag (or indeed pocket), no matter if you are a beginner or a seasoned photographer. Would I buy one ? - Yes, anything that meets my needs and adds to my flexibility, while also saving me weight on longer trips is a no bainer.

A link to the filter on the website can be found below, it comes in various filter sizes, if you are buying one, my tip would be to buy the one with the diameter of your biggest lens, you can always buy step down rings for other lenses but you can’t use a smaller filter on bigger diameter lenses.

https://www.kentfaith.com/82mm-filters/KF01.1064_82mm-nd2-nd32-variable-nd-filter-18-layer-multi-coated-glass

I’ve included a few images I’ve shot using this filter, images taken using the Nikon D810 & Nikon 16-35mm F/4 lens.

Creating Award Winning Images with depth - Click + to view the images Large