The photograph I have chosen for this month is not new but has been recently 're-worked' - I will explain more later. Despite having been made a few years ago, it remains one of my personal favourites; partly because it is a beautiful scene but also because this is my spiritual home - the Lake District and, specifically, the area around Keswick. I genuinely feel my spirit soar as I near the northern Lakes. This, then, is one of my favourite viewpoints; the top of Walla Crag offers such superb views for such modest effort that it it would be mad to overlook it.
On this morning, the forecast for cold, clear weather promised much and I was not disappointed. I had Walla Crag all to myself for a couple of hours and enjoyed the most peaceful time watching the mist burn away as the sun grew in strength. I then had the enormous, if slightly mean, pleasure of meeting another photographer on his way up as I headed down, aware of what he had missed out on by having his breakfast beforehand (if you tell me you wouldn't get some pleasure from that, I don't believe you).
The photograph was taken on Velvia 50 film using my Mamiya Pro TL and has only been printed once, direct from transparency. Until a couple of days ago, I thought that I had lost the transparency but I eventually found it (I really need to sort out my storage system) and decided to get a high resolution scan before I misplaced it again. The beauty of having a decent digitised version is that I have been able to lighten the fells a little - something I was unable to do with scans from my own flatbed. This now better resembles the original.
There is one other thing that makes this picture special to me: It won the Wainwright Society Photographic Competition a few years back. Now I don't kid myself that this competition had a huge entry but the judge was one of my photography 'heros', Derry Brabbs. Derry produced the photographs for all but one of the 'coffee table' Wainwright books and was instrumental in kick starting my passion for landscape photography as well as inspiring me to my first ever, very modest, published work. The knowledge that he liked this enough to select it as his winner is a source of great satisfaction.
Prints available from my website : www.landscapeandlight.co.uk
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