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June 2007
The alarm clock jolted me out of my sleep at 4:30am. It was already light outside, but the sun hadn’t yet actually risen. After a couple of minutes of debating
"should I, shouldn’t I" in my head, I eventually gave in to myself and got up, quickly got dressed and picked up my camera bag before
quietly heading out of the door, trying not to wake any of the other guests at the B&B.
I was heading out to Blea Tarn, a location that I had researched on the map and knew would be a great dawn location. The drive there seemed to take forever
despite the relatively few miles as the light constantly changed around me. As I turned out of Ambleside, I could see low mist hanging in the valleys. I hoped
that the mist would still be present when I arrived at Blea Tarn. As I turned the corner and drove over a bridge, I caught sight of the pink glow illuminating
the sky and reflecting in the river in my rear view mirror and prayed that this colour wouldn’t disappear before I reached my destination.
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Blea Tarn, Lake District. |
I finally arrived at the car park by Blea Tarn. A camper van was already parked up and I wondered whether I had been beaten to the lake or whether the occupant
was curled up all snugly inside. I got out of the car and made my way down to the edge of the tarn. I could see nobody else around, and started to set up my
camera.
The colour in the sky had vanished and there was no mist swirling over the tarn. I really hoped that despite getting up so early, I hadn’t missed all the
dawn action. I was contemplating how and if I was going to proceed, when I suddenly heard a voice. I turned around to see a man with a couple of dogs walking
over the top of a mound. The dogs came bounding in my direction, sniffing around my tripod. When the owner finally caught up with them, he gave me the cheery
news that I had just missed the best of the light, for it had now turned flat and uninteresting. Great. I had got up early and I still missed the dawn light at
its best.
We started chatting, as there was no reason to take any photographs in the foreseeable future. The dog owner turned out to be a fellow photographer and local
resident. There’s nothing like a local to give you all the information you could not easily find out yourself about a location. He told me the names of the
mountains I could see around me (saving me hours poring over a map with a compass trying to work it out myself) and said that despite the fact that the light
was very flat right now, once the sun had risen a little more, experience told him that it might then light up the focus mountains behind the tarn, Langdale
Pikes. The more we chatted, the less the light did anything. It seemed to be getting no better at all as it was making its slow ascent into the sky. After a
couple of hours, the light hadn’t changed at all and the dogs were getting impatient. We decided that this obviously wasn’t the morning for great photography
and I packed up my camera without having taken a shot. We walked a couple of meters back towards the car park when something made us turn around. Suddenly there
was light illuminating the fells to the side of the tarn. We both looked at each other, shocked at the sudden change in the conditions. It wasn’t anything
spectacular, not worth getting our cameras out for, but it had proved us both wrong when we had said that things were not going to improve only a few minutes
earlier. As we stood there contemplating what to do, the light got better and better, to the point when contemplating whether to just go back for a shower and
some breakfast was quickly put out of our minds. We both knew that we were going to stay.
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The border collie posing for the 1/2 sec exposure. |
We headed back to the waters edge and got out our cameras, again. The sun was side-lighting the landscape in front of the tarn, bringing out the detail in
the rocks. It was looking beautiful. However, Langdale Pikes behind them was still looking flat and somewhat blue in the shadow. I took a few shots of the
reflections of the side-lighted rocks, while my new friend set up his camera a little further round the tarn. Suddenly, Langdale Pikes was lit with the same
gorgeous side-lighting and my shutter went into overdrive.
I shot two rolls of film before we decided that it was finally time for breakfast. The dogs had started to get impatient and our tummies were beginning to
rumble. We had, afterall, been up for over three hours already!
As we headed back to the car park, a milk float drove past. The first sign of other life that we had seen. The world was beginning to wake up now and the early
hours of the morning, a time known to few others except landscape photographers, was over. Breakfast was beckoning for both humans and dogs.
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