Lake Vyrnwy at dusk

It’s been a while since I’ve written here mainly because photography-wise the past few months have been a bit of a winter of discontent. Maybe I’ve been unlucky but attractive light seems to have been a scarce commodity recently, and this alone has stopped me producing much that I’ve been happy with. The heavy snowfalls haven’t exactly helped, but in the last couple of weeks the longest winter I can remember has finally released the landscape from its icy clutches.

Some of my more successful recent images have come from north Powys. On a beautiful March morning at a sheepfold high above Cwm Eunant, I looked towards the snow-capped peaks of Aran Fawddwy and Aran Benllyn, and a few evenings back I returned to a spot above Lake Vyrnwy that I first visited over ten years ago.

Returning to these places a few years later, it surprises me how little I remember of them, the routes blurring into a sequence of vague memories and half forgotten details. A stile, a path through a wood, a stream crossing or maybe a hillside bathed in evening sunlight. Is that here or was that somewhere else? In his book Hell Of A Journey, Mike Cawthorne recounts the experience of mountaineer Doug Scott who claims to have no memory of the summit of Everest beyond the one photograph he took there.

Looking over Lake Vyrnwy on an evening more like the one I was hoping for the first time, my original image, shot on 35mm Fujichrome Velvia, suddenly seems like a lifetime ago. I now work digitally on equipment costing orders of magnitude more, and I’m more experienced technically and artistically. The intervening ten years has been an adventure, and on the way I think I’ve developed a stronger sense of the type of images I want to create. Although I love the Mid Wales landscape and I’m sure I’ll continue to photograph it, part of me feels restless and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s time to seek out some new challenges.

The path starts to open out as it crosses the valley floor, before rising upwards to a gate, then turning steeply up the slope to a small hanging valley and the interestingly named Craig y Diawl or “Devil’s Rock”. Following the stream up the hill for a short way you can find the farm of Lluest Pant y Llyn, now a ruin.

There are very few trees on the Elenydd plateau and it seems that this small stand was planted to provide a bit of shelter from the prevailing wind. At this time of year anyone who lived up here would certainly have been glad of them.

I have something of a fascination with these trees and have spent the last year thinking about the best conditions in which to photograph them. I now think I know, and I’m quite looking forward to it.

For this reason I was quite interested and surprised to stumble across this discussion about “edges” on a blog that I subscribe to.
http://www.brucepercy.com/blog/?p=1027

Although my fascination with this idea comes out in a few of my blog posts, I’ve never read Niall Benvie’s essay before. It seems that a lot of us arrive at this concept independently.

Stormy morning above the Clywedog reservoir

Ffrwd Fawr, the following morning

The mountains of Wales are justly infamous as one of the wetter parts of Britain and—according to Wikipedia—Europe. Having spent a couple of weeks in Norway when I was 17, I’m not at all convinced, but it’s true that the moorland plateaus of Mid Wales see rain on over 200 days of the year, with some of the upland catchments experiencing 2500mm annually.

I’m rarely keen on photographing the Mid Wales landscape in fine weather. To me, it seems conceptually wrong: there has always been a wild side to these uplands and I feel it is an essential part of their character. Capturing the drama of the landscape is an important part of my colour work, and I am fascinated by fleeting moments of light or an elusive combination of elements in the landscape. In many ways, rainbows are the embodiment of this concept and I love to photograph them when I get the chance.

Part of what excites me about landscape photography is the uncertainty. Some of what I feel are my best landscape images were not preconceived, rather they came about as a response to the scene in front of me at the time. It is these images, the products of unrepeatable moments, that I feel are the ones that are truly personal to me.

Photographically speaking, summer isn’t always very productive for me, and this year I’ve done very little in the way of serious photography since June. So the accompanying image here comes from a few years back.

I hiked across from the neighbouring valley to take this shot, looking over Nant y Dernol on a hot afternoon in mid August, and I think I timed it quite well with the bracken just starting to turn. Although that afternoon felt like the height of summer, the following evening was colder somehow, with a crystal clarity to the light. I knew then that autumn was on its way. It often surprises me just how quickly the seasons can change, particularly at this time of year when the nights start to draw in rapidly.

Some people hate the dark nights but I’ve never been bothered by them. Something I’ve learned as a landscape photographer, which was also reinforced to me above Nant y Dernol that afternoon, is to make the most of every time of year. The next change is always around the corner.

The left bank of the lane is actually part of Offa’s Dyke, and is mentioned in Jim Saunders‘ book Offa’s Dyke: A Journey in Words and Pictures—well worth a look for its excellent photography. The road itself is older and forms part of the Roman road up Long Mountain, eventually leading to the Roman ruins at Wroxeter where, in the nearby field, I landed in a hot air balloon around this time last year.

This time of year often marks something of an end to my photography. As summer approaches, the leaves turn darker and the light loses some of its attractive quality. As if this wasn’t enough, the uplands are plagued by midges, the roads choke with traffic, and holiday cottages become prohibitively expensive as the schools break up.

But I don’t want to think about any of that. In the meantime there is nothing better than this lane, fading in the flaxen light of a late spring evening. Bats hunt beneath the trees as I head back to the car, and a silence descends.

I often feel that many landscape photographers are preoccupied with calm conditions and “golden hour” light, to the exclusion of anything else. There are so many images of colourful sunrises and mountains reflected in lakes. This isn’t the nature I know. The nature I love is dark, exciting, wild and just a little bit untamed.

The beach at Ynyslas

I have spent a couple of evenings at the coast recently, which is something I almost never do. Partly as a result of spending too many summers in Cornwall, the Cambrian coast doesn’t really do it for me. Having said that, I did find some promising locations that I’d like to come back to when the light is a bit better.

One thing I quickly found out is that it’s not until you take a camera into the dunes that you realise just how much the sand gets everywhere. Trying to change lenses was a mistake I won’t be making again, and my well-travelled tripod also seemed to take on a lot of sand, giving me another excuse to upgrade it.

There were very few people on the train that night and, as we left the station, I was surprised to find that I still had the carriage to myself. The fluorescent lights were flickering disconcertingly and I gave up trying to read. I soon found myself staring into the blackness, watching the edge of the track rushing past in the light from the carriage windows.

Needless to say, the journey was passing quite slowly, when the lights suddenly gave up altogether and I was pitched into darkness.

Except that it wasn’t darkness. In front of me, visible for the first time, lay miles of English countryside—a land of misted brooks, twinkling villages and cold, moonlit spires; of fields, woods and twisting lanes, hedges pale with hoarfrost.

It was hard not to feel a sense of loss: a feeling that somewhere in all of our technological progress, a part of our collective spirit seemed to have gone; some of our innocence lost. We are a nation of story-tellers, yet we now travel hundreds of miles across the countryside with no tales to tell, and it takes a circuit breaker to trip in our manufactured world before we experience what lies beyond the darkness at the end of the platform.

The legends and superstitions of earlier centuries were the products of a society less enlightened in all ways, yet in the moonlight it was easy to see where these tales could have sprung from, told around flickering firesides and similar in some ways to experiences I would have later—coming down from Moel-y-Golfa on a scented summer night, the woods rustling with badgers; or on the Old Kenmare Road in western Ireland, sure to have had its share of… ghosts.

A flickering light at the other end of the carriage: the guard, fiddling with some control panel on the wall. He never got the lights to come back on, and I was glad of my escape from the manufactured world.

I tend to find myself reaching for certain lenses more than others, which can restrict my photographic style. For this trip up the River Wye I forced myself to take just one lens: a 70-200mm f2.8 that I don’t use very often. Sometimes, by deliberately restricting the possibilities, I get to discover images that I might otherwise miss, such as these beautiful caustics in the river.