Wolds Hawthorn
On seeing a vision for interpreting the Wolds come to fruition
2010 was my first proper photographic experience of flowering hawthorn trees in the Yorkshire Wolds. So many of the valleys have hawthorns growing on their sides and come mid-May the Wolds is typically a riot of white flowers. Paul Moon and I were exploring the Wolds around the same time as Hockney was in the midst of making his famous series of images there, though he started a few years earlier in the early to mid 2000s and he was concentrating primarily by this stage on the Wolds closer to his studio near Bridlington - Woldgate. Paul and I were centred on the Millington complex of valleys - a short drive for us. Close enough to call our own photographic backyard.
I had plenty of Sunday outings that year to build up my anticipation and to get a feel for the locations I would work. I had also fixed on my interpretation - using a short tele (240mm on 5×4) to construct Wolds scenics, often with no sky. This turned out to be a perfect marriage of film (transparency), camera (large format with movements to add a little tilt) and subject (narrow twisty valleys). The final part of the jigsaw was remembering the teachings from my earlier Yorkshire Dales workshop on how to light the scene in the right way. Dawn and sunset were typically the wrong kind of lighting - too warm and anyway by that stage the sun position was unlikely to light many of the valleys.
I imagined the sun as a giant spotlight illuminating the scene like a torch. The Sunday morning of the alternative image made in the beautiful Sylvan Dale was the first go at that approach. It was a perfect cloudy/sunny day with plenty of cloud to hide the sun. I set up the composition and waited for the sun spots to move up and along the valley until they were in the perfect position. Easy to say and execute now with digital capture but remember I was shooting 5×4 sheet film metered manually with a light meter - and Velvia is unforgiving: more than a third of a stop out and the image is close to unusable. At £10 a sheet and with only 10-12 sheets in the bag, imagine the nerves of steel it takes to press the cable release to activate the shutter at the perfect moment.
The second (main) image was made the following day, bank holiday Monday, in the same valley but looking in the opposite direction. It owes more than a little debt to Paul as he had found this tree on the Sunday after the light had gone for good and we had discussed the options and I thought this much tighter composition than his interpretation would work. I was out this time with my son and we got some lovely early evening light. I actually prefer it slightly to the alternative image even though there is less spotlighting going on - it works instead because of the slight raking nature to the evening light.
It was an absolute privilege to be able to independently interpret a landscape in parallel with such a wonderful creative as Hockney. I remember one of my absolute life highlights was seeing the Hockney exhibition featuring much of his Wolds work at the Royal Academy at a private viewing one evening - an event my firm arranged. A remarkable exhibition and as I walked around I remembered in particular my experience of these two outings and pictures.
