The River Idle runs for 26 miles through Nottinghamshire, eventually discharging into the River Trent at West Stockwith. It’s source is a confluence of two smaller rivers, the Maun and the Meden near Markham Moor, just beside the busy A1 road.
While there are a number of suggested sources for the Idle’s name, the origin is not confirmed.
I took this photograph of the river where it flows through Retford, beneath the chesterfield canal, which crosses it on an aqueduct. On this day, the weather was very nice, and the light cast upon and through the waters, illuminating the riverbed and long streamers of gently twisting water weed.
Yashica Mat 124G & Fujifilm Pro 400H. Lab developed, home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro. Converted to B&W in Lightroom.
I thought I’d go back to posting film shots again today – although I may drop in the occasional digital picture now and then as I still have loads of decent shots taken with my GRIII on my recent holiday. I have another “Walk With a Camera” post coming soon – perhaps this weekend – as well.
Despite the title of the post, this tree has only the most tenuous connection with brides or weddings. It stands, however, behind a cafe where we got a sandwich after my wife had chosen the dress she will be wearing at out eldest son’s wedding later this summer. Maybe the post should have been titled “Back of the cafe tree” as that would be more geographically apt – the formal wear shop where my wife got her dress was further down the road.
Last month I took my Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 folding camera for it’s first outing in quite some time – about two years, in fact!
It’s quite a nice camera, if a little slow to operate due to its uncoupled rangefinder design which requires focus to be achieved by means of a dial on top of the camera that operates the rangefinder, and then manually transferring the distance on the dial to the lens itself. The lens is quite nice though and gives good results if you set it correctly. Plus, of course, the folding design means it can be slipped into a pocket (ok, a big-ish pocket).
Transferring the focus distance is straightforward enough but, if you’re not paying attention (or haven’t used the camera in a while!) it can be easy to make mistakes where some of the distances have half marks. This is what happened on this outing, and I only realised after I’d taken four or five pictures. I hoped that my use of small apertures might have reduced any focus issues, but on looking at the scans, a few frames are noticeably soft.
The two shots shared here are ok though, as are some others that I’ll share over the next few days. Hopefully I’ll pay closer attention next time I shoot with the camera.
Another digital shot today. As mentioned yesterday, I’ve been out all day today meeting up with some film photographer friends. We met up in the village of Castleton in the Derbyshire Peak District and spent the day wandering the village and surrounding area. We were all shooting film, but I also had my Ricoh GRII with me, and took the photo you see here today. The picture here today is of Cavedale, a gorge just to the south of the village. Up at the top on the left is the keep of Peveril Castle, which we climbed to earlier in the day.
I shot a roll of 120 Tri-X, plus most of a roll of 120 Fuji Pro 500H and 35mm Ilford HP5+. The HP5+ was shot using my new 28-300mm zoom lens, so it will be interesting to see how those turn out (and if I’ve managed to mess any of them up…). I’ll post any worth sharing once I have them developed and scanned.
Apologies to anyone expecting the second part of my post covering the walk between Elton and Robin Hood’s Stride. That should be here tomorrow – I got waylaid today, unfortunately.
Here instead is another photo taken during the walk but which didn’t feature in the first half of the post published yesterday.
This is the third of these posts, and the second for which I selected a hike from my Ordnance Survey book: Peak District – Outstanding Circular Walks. I was going to be slightly OCD about the routes in this book and do them in order, but I then decided that would be silly and that I should do them in whatever order suited me. In this case, I skipped the second walk in the book because it was a location I’m quite familiar with, and this one is somewhere I’ve never visited before.
The route of this walk is in the Derbyshire countryside to the north of the village of Elton. It’s a short route of just over three miles, with an elevation of 750 feet. While the guide gives an approximate time of 2 hours to complete the walk, because I’m faffing around taking photographs, it took me somewhat longer.
Although Elton isn’t too far, much of the drive there is on smaller roads, so it took about an hour to get there and park up. The weather was a little overcast when I arrived, but with the promise of some brighter spells later. The starting point for the hike is outside the Duke of York pub, across from the village church.
Not long after this, there was a slightly confusing branch of the path in a field that first had me wandering around some farm machinery before wandering off down the wrong fork. It was a little while later, after descending a hill and then crossing a large pool of muddy ground near the entrance to a field that I realised my error. Luckily, re-checking my map, I could see that the narrow road I was now on would curve around and intersect the original footpath, so I stayed on this course. This wasn’t a bad thing as, part way up a hill at a bend in the road, I came across a series of water troughs, fed by a spring.
These troughs are called the Burycliffe Troughs and the spring that fills them has never been known to run dry. Until 1940, these were Elton’s main source of drinking water, and men, women, and children would walk here in all weathers to collect water in buckets and then carry them back up the hill to the village. One enterprising farmer would fill urns of water and transport them in a cart, selling them for a penny a bucketful.
A little further up the road I rejoined my original route and broke off into a field to the left. The path led through another field where this tree stood near the ridge of the hill.
As the path descended, it reached another track, this one leading to a Christian sanctuary / retreat. On the other side of the track a lone piece of farm machinery stood on the grass.
While crossing the next field I spotted a herd of animals off to my left. I soon realised that these were deer. I took a photograph but it should be noted that the Olympus XA3 is not a useful wildlife camera. You can see the deer in this picture though – they are the black pixels about a quarter of the way up the frame. 😀
One thing you find a lot of in the Peak District (and, to be fair, a lot of the British countryside) are drystone walls. This arrangement of walls with a lone tree looked like a decent photograph to take.
In the opposite direction, a track led to a farm sitting atop the ridge of a hill.
A little further along the route, the path I needed to follow crossed a small stream before curving up and to the east through some woodland. There were signs of forestry activity here, and it marked a good place to park myself on a fallen log and take a drink of water. It also marks the place where I’ll leave the first part of this post. In part two there will be stone circles, rock outcrops, and a hermitage!
Steel City Snapper photography 