Lake District National Park: re-learning to love black and white

We spent 10 days in the Lake District National Park during June. It’s a place both myself. and Emma, my wife, love. We got engaged there and spent our honeymoon there.

Summer photography in the mountains is tricky, with haze often resulting in washed out colours. I’ve yet to find a solution i’m happy with to combatting haze without post processing. So I took it as an opportunity to experiment with something I don’t do very often - black and white photography.

I had a whale of a time, I found myself spotting textures, shapes and patterns far more. The light was pretty flat for much of the trip, so this was somewhat of a compensation mechanism. However, i’ve come home with some images that i’m really happy with. Exploring black and white is something i’ll continue to do on Dartmoor periodically, this trip reminded me how much I enjoy it and that it should be something I do more of.

The images below have been created with a Fujifilm recipe i’ve been working on. This is the first black and white one i’ve created. There are several colour ones that i’ll gradually share on here and on social media over the next few weeks. This one seems to work really nicely to create some contrasty images which have some real mood to them, yet suit a wide variety of different subjects.