This and that...: To the Lakes of England (4)

Finally, I have forced myself to write part IV of this series. So, where was I? Ah yes, I set off on the walk from the Tourist Information Centre supposedly towards Orrest Head. But, as has become rather too usual with me, I got the route wrong and ended up walking back and forth a main road, trying to find some sort of a footpath that would lead me uphill. I finally found it, behind brightly coloured iron railings - this was much to my chagrin, as the guide I had with me directed the reader to walk behind those very iron railings. Now, what matters is that I found the footpath and started on my leisurely climb. The footpath took me along sheltered tree-lined paths that largely insulated me from the somewhat hostile weather out in the open.

It was not until I entered what looked like a picnic spot with wooden benches that I realised that the weather, which appeared to be clearing earlier, had gone back to the familiar state of dense clouds, drizzle and strong winds. It meant, from a photographic point of view, that I was faced with a situation that was new to me - shooting in weather that is very far from ideal. In a way, worse was to come, as this picnic spot was still not entirely out in the open - just that it offered a vantage point from which one could see Windermere and the hills around it through some clearing in the woods. I took a couple of snaps here that hopefully illustrates the poor contrast of the distant views.

And soon I realised that the very consumer Sigma lens I was carrying was making things far worse than they really were (nothing I could not work around later on the computer, but I was not sure when I took the shots) and I changed over to the old manual focus Nikkor 35-105mm lens - I wanted to use a telephoto range lens since I was shooting well into the distance. This lens immediately seemed to do better and I felt relieved that my first results with the Sigma were not entirely due to my limitations as a photographer!

Soon after, I came to a point where a few steps of a relatively steep climb brought me to the open Orrest Head and I immediately came face-to-face with the full force of the weather, which I would now call nasty. There were a few people already there, but as the wind seemed to be picking up and the drizzle getting heavier, they decided it was not worth it, leaving me alone with the elements. I set up my tripod - in the process, I had to remove my skiing gloves, thus letting my skin interact directly with the chilly wind; and the wind just blew the gloves away and I had to run after it a few steps downhill on the side opposite to that I had climbed in order to retrieve it. I am glad that I was successful in getting it back; otherwise the rest of the evening would have been miserable! With the tripod in place and the Nikon D50 safely fixed on to it (I decided not to get the Nikon F100 out in all this miserable weather), I set about capturing low contrast images showing views over lake Windermere on one side and some greener valleys on the other. The shots over Windermere presented a particularly frustrating problem of having to wipe the front element of the lens every few seconds: the drizzle was falling at an angle and towards the camera. God knows how many times I had to wipe the lens dry, but I did it and managed to take some shots including those of "God's finger" breaking out through the dense clouds!

Despite the stormy weather, and may be because of it, and definitely because of being the only one taking in the sights at that moment, a strong feeling of independence and incorruptible and insuppressible power seemed to rise in me - an unexplainable feeling of exhilaration! That did not last wrong: as if pricking a balloon full of air with a pin this chap came running hard and fast up the hill wearing only a T-shirt and short pants with his fit dog and passed downhill on the other side in no time! Pffffffffffftttt!

Soon it was time to return to the guest house, and on the way back I had a lunner or whatever they call it - the evening equivalent of the early afternoon brunch! As I walked back, the cloud cleared - a state of weather that was largely constant over the next days - and that meant I had to take a walk again, a low-level walk to the lake. And that is what I did after having dumped most of my kit in my room and taking only the D50 with the 35-105mm lens and the tripod. I walked to this little mound called Queen Adelaide's hill for some simple view of Windermere and the mountains beyond under a sky glowing in the twilight sun.

On climbing down from this hill, I walked to a nearby jetty and bagged a few slow-speed snaps that make the lake look like a could of vapour; later I realised that, due to the winds that had not quite calmed down, there was substantial shake in most of these images, and hence a visit to the same location on another day was going to be essential.