Reflected Light

On staying behind after school to practise alchemy

I had been going on workshops regularly for three years by 2008. That was a significant year for me in many ways not least because I moved back up to Yorkshire from London. I was also beginning to feel much more confident wielding my 5×4 technical camera in the field. With the Yorkshire Dales now on my doorstep, I decided to try a more local workshop based there in the early Autumn.

It was a fairly small group - about 6 if I recall - and it was probably the workshop I learned the most. Lots of lessons about scouting, lighting scenes and as it turned out the value of staying behind after the workshop finished. This was the moment that it clicked for me that lighting a scene did not just mean setting up the camera at dawn or dusk. In other words, other lighting (dramatic or otherwise) is available - and to be honest - preferable.

The alternative image was just such a lesson. It was not a honey pot location picked to visit at dawn - it was scouted from the roadside and we timed a visit to coincide with some beautiful raking side light. The main image was made the day after the workshop finished. For the first time I opted to stay an extra day and revisit some of the locations the group had visited during the week. If I recall the main image was shot at Wain Wath Force - a dramatic waterfall on the River Swale. On the workshop I had spent all the session making predictable (and boring) pictures of the falls. Fun but not particularly meaningful or satisfying. As we waited for the group to assemble I and a few others noticed some lovely reflections in the river Swale a little ways away from the main falls. Somehow that lodged in my head.

Being the only member of the group that stayed an extra night after the workshop finished, I was on my own for a day. I visited a couple of locations but remembered those reflections and set out to make an image around the same time of day. The light was performing again and I set up with the 240mm to make the main image. I thought nothing more of it until I got the transparency back and was stunned by how beautiful an object it was when sitting on the light box. Probably the first time I got that sense of alchemy having happened with the camera. Which eventually became the title of my first real sequence of images.