Lakeland Snow day
Me and Bo took a trip to the Lake District last weekend, I haven’t been in quite a while, and I have been working my way through the Wainwrights (214 peaks within the park) and had the urge to knock some more off the list!
I Took my M4 and F3 with the intention of using both - colour in the Nikon, and black and white in the Leica, but that didn’t work out, more on that later!
Funnily enough, I hadn’t even considered the thought that there might be snow still on the peaks, its been that long since I had any snow at home, and even that had melted within a few hours, I just completely forgot it was a possibility!
When we arrived the conditions were pretty bleak, the clouds were low, light was non-existent, and any signs of colour were few and far between.
Everywhere was white or washed in a dreary winter grey.
After pondering my options for a while, I consulted the weather oracle, and the sun was due to break in a couple of hours so I just waited it out, sat in the lay-by alongside Haweswater reservoir.
As you can tell from the photos, we did eventually leave the van! Heading up the Old Corpse Road, I had intentions of topping Selside Pike, Braintree, and Harter Fell before coming back down past Small Water, but this wasn’t to be.
The snow a long much of the top was around a foot in depth - not an issue for me, but for Bo it made the hike considerably harder, and to do that for 10 or so kilometres would be silly.
We would summit Selside Pike and make our way back down the way we came, the only other option being traversing across and over Braintree, and even that is a long way when she’s up to her belly in snow.
The conditions at the top were wonderful, the sun was coming through illuminating the snow giving some warmth, the blue sky broke up the white, and the darker clouds made a dramatic skyline.
With the colours the way there were, I decided it would be somewhat of a waste to shoot with black and white, so loaded a roll of Kodak Gold 200 into the F3, meter set to 100 - which is my usual practice with Gold, and also set a Stop of over compensation on the meter, I was curious to see how aperture priority would expose these scenes with such bright conditions.
With bright scenes like snow easily tricking light meters into under exposing scenes, I had now effectively 2 stops of over exposure from the films ‘box speed’.
As the for the lens, I had my Voigtlander 40mm f2 Ultron - this has quickly become my favourite lens for my Nikon, I absolutely love 40mm now. I can quite confidently walk around with just this lens and be happy, with 35 and 50 I would struggle with committing to just one, but 40mm seems to be perfect for me!
Having reached the top of Selside Pike, and claiming my 50th out of 214 Wainwrights, we made our way back down the way we came, and headed for home!
