I finally managed to get out to do some landscape photography last Monday when I had a day out in Ribblesdale and surrounding areas with my good friend and professional photographer Ade Mcfade. It was a bright but cloudy day with a strong wind blowing which brought frequent snow showers to locations and turned the mundane into interesting landscapes in a matter of a few minutes.

When we got into the hills and up to the snow line, the snow was around 6-8 inches deep, so it was a challenge to keep our feet on some of the slippery limestone pavements. With this sort of weather the scenery changed dramatically from the normal type of images you might expect to capture up there. We spent most of the day stopping at known locations and some unknown which suddenly became interesting and offered photographic opportunities that on a normal day would not be there as the snow turned them to a winter wonderland.

With the snow showers moving in and out all day, there were some good images to be had.  When the cold (a big wind chill factor going on this day from the strong wind) finally got the better of us we moved on to a different location to find what the snow had done to the scenery there.

I started out shooting with my Canon 5DMkIII and either the 70-200mm f2.8 zoom or my wide angle 16-35mm f2.8 zoom lens. These two are my favourite combination for working in the landscape. But I had brought along my 400mm f5.6 which proved very useful for some distance shots of a moody snow covered Pen-y- Ghent. Getting a telephoto view of some landscapes can be beneficial with the telephoto effect of the lens providing a compressing perspective and giving a different view point to the normal.

Shooting with ‘live view’ worked well for most of the images until the camera decided that the batteries had had enough and ‘live view’ stopped working. The camera would take pictures but you didn’t get a display of the image you had taken. So I swapped over to my Fuji mirrorless camera which had my Zeiss 12mm F2.8 on for the day, which allowed the trip to continue. So as the light was starting to fade, we headed off to finish the day at one of the limestone pavements with the famous tree and despite the cold wind, the Fuji performed faultlessly all the time.

While I love working with the Canon DSLR which is solid and weighty (and helped weight down the tripod!) and is usually so reliable,  I did have had a 5DmkII stop working in these type of conditions a few year ago, so perhaps its worth having extra batteries on hand for these type of conditions.

It was good to have the Fuji in a bag ready to take over and I enjoyed using it with the Zeiss lens.  The final three images are from the Fuji.

So a good day out in Ribblesdale and beyond……