Field journal
Locations, hours and working method for landscape photography across the British coast, moor and hill country.
Where the journal works
Each section holds its own locations, its own hours and its own failures. They are kept apart because the coast and the high moor do not reward the same habits.
Shingle, saltmarsh, harbour walls and the long tidal flats. Tide tables read as light schedules, and the particular problem of photographing water that will not hold still.
Peat, heather, gritstone and granite, from Dartmoor to the Cairngorms. Approach routes, plateau navigation before first light, and the weight you can actually carry up them.
Fronts, inversions, sea fog and the flat days in between. How to read a synoptic chart the night before and decide which hill is worth the alarm clock.
Bluebells, bracken, heather and frost, and the narrow windows they open. Notes kept year on year, so that the timing stops being a guess.
Tripods on peat and scree, filters in hill wind, keeping a front element dry on an exposed ridge. Method that survives contact with British conditions.
The British landscape plates, held in five numbered sets. Each plate carries its location, the conditions on the day, and what the frame was trying to do.
The index
Dated as they were written, newest first. Locations, conditions, and what came back on the card.
The North Sea fog that fills the east coast harbours between May and August is not random. It follows sea surface temperature and an onshore wind with a light gradient, and both are published the evening before. Here is how that forecast turns into a departure time.
Between Aldeburgh and Bawdsey the beach is stone rather than sand, and stone behaves very differently in the ten minutes after rain. A working account of the tide, the wind and the frame.
Graduated filters are a fair weather idea until the gusts arrive. What stays on the lens, what goes back in the bag, and where the vibration is actually coming from.
The plateau is easy ground in daylight and a maze of peat channels in the dark. Route choice, timing from the car park, and where the edge actually gives you a foreground.
Flowering runs by altitude and by burning rotation, so one moor can be three weeks apart from end to end. Notes on where the colour lands first.
Flat grey cloud is a very large softbox, and it suits woodland, water and stone far better than a clear sunrise does. What to point it at instead of going home.
On a firth this shallow the water leaves faster than you can walk. Working out which hour of the ebb gives you the channels, and which one strands you.
Three surfaces that all move, each in its own way and on its own timescale. How to set the legs so the frame is still square at the end of a two minute exposure.
The first archive set opens with the four figure plate numbers kept from the original sequence. What each number records, and why the order is not chronological.
Weathered granite is all horizontal joints and rounded blocks. Overhead sun flattens every one of them, and a low sun from the side puts them back.
The flowers hold their colour for a short spell and photograph badly for most of the day. Which wood, which aspect, and which part of the morning.
Cold air pools in the bottom of a valley on a still clear night, and the cloud that forms there sits below the ridge line. The conditions that make it, and the ones that ruin it.
Archive
The archive is held in numbered sets, in the sequence the plates were catalogued. Each plate keeps its original number.
