BARCODE - Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire

This view of the river wharfe is just down from the Strid in Bolton abbey. Some of you may remember an earlier image ‘scum’; well this is very same scum that is produced by a 20-meter river being forced through a small bottleneck. I find it inspiring that something so normally considered so undesirable looks so beautiful when viewed differently. (But that’s another story)

What I like about this image is the mirror like reflections the long exposure gives you; it’s almost like a natural bar code. (I wonder what price this would come up with? There is a metaphor there somewhere I’m sure!) Anyway, what attracted me to the spot was the shallow pebble bank in the foreground. From a distance it was some 5 meters out from the bank and because the water was full of peat from the heavy rain the previous day, the bank gave a lovely shimmer. The front of the image here isn’t out of focus its being blurred by the deeper water in front. Hey I even tried throwing grass in the foreground on this to try and create some green blur, and it did moderately work, but the colour didn’t work with the rest of the shot. (Oh if you think I'm mad, it was a 30 second exposure and the grass turned out a pale shade of green from the movement. (I must have looked a total fool thought, but when enjoying oneself in this way, its good to scare off the locals)

The weather was also extremely windy, (gale force in-fact) and you can just make out the blurred branches on the distant trees. Funny the wind that day really scared me. When I walked a couple of miles up stream from this spot, you find yourself up high above the river and the wind was ‘much’ stronger. I spent a bit of time setting up a shot of some trees swaying in the wind, (I wanted not to waist the opportunity of such extreme weather conditions), but a very big gust of wind shook the massive beach tree I was sheltering under. Now you might imagine, not the best place to be in such conditions, so I held my nerve till the knuckles on my fingers went white and made a hasty retreat back down to lower ground. It’s a shame I didn’t have a helmet (Ha, no I'm not serous honest) as id have loved to explore this kind of movement more, but the risks were just too much. Risky business this landscape photography lark!