Curbar Edge (January 2020) - Part 1

The fine weekend weather drew the crowds onto Curbar Edge in January. Every available parking opportunity, including some creative ones, had been taken on the road leading up to Curbar Gap. We were lucky to find a spot in the car park just as someone was leaving and really enjoyed the walk along the Edge.

I divided the photography into two main subjects: landscapes which I will cover here and then gritstone studies which I will post separately.

The landscapes reminded me that I don't take many 'golden hour' photographs theses days. I certainly haven't used the tripod, the wide angle lens, and grad filters in a long while. However, when I was using this type of equipment I would have never really considered handholding the camera for this type of photography preferring instead to choose a shutter speed that maximised the depth of field and allowed a range of filters to manage the exposures. Achieving the best quality capture was the aim.

These days I am more relaxed about the outcomes but I was interested to see if there where any quality issues with the following images, all handheld at an ISO 250, 100th of a second at f8, with an 18-150mm Canon ‘m’ lens (Canon M6 body). The most frequent focal length was 40 to 50mm with some at 18mm and a few at 100mm:

Looking at the above images I can’t see any real technical issues impacting on these photographs. There might be some softening in the distance and perhaps a little noise, but without any form of comparison it is impossible to draw that conclusion. In light of this, I have set an objective to get out at least once a month with the full DSLR kit and tripod (I did actually achieve this in early February and will post the result in the next week or so).

The clouds rolled in towards the end of this afternoon visit to Curbar Edge and there was one last chance to capture the light in the form of receding tones across the valley. This is where handholding a camera with a medium to long range zoom has an advantage as it is much easier to be flexible to the changing conditions: