Mark's Blog

Inspired by viewings of Black and White Photographer, Michael Kenna's superb work, I came across an image on his website recently that I swore must be of a copse in a little village by the name of Great Smeaton in North Yorkshire. The reason I was so sure is that I lived in Great Smeaton for many years and this copse always stuck out as being very photogenic (although I wasn't into photography as much back then). I thus decided to make a note to visit there myself at some point soon to see what I could make of it. That day came sooner than I thought as I was heading to Darlington on the road through Great Smeaton to collect my good friend and fellow north east landscape photographer, John Harbron as we'd arranged to head out for the day with our cameras. This particular day was very cold yet...

I recently had chance to visit a lavender farm near Terrington, York a few weeks ago and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with the new Lumix G3 camera I’d borrowed. It was the ideal camera for getting in among all the lavender and other brightly coloured flowers to make a few pics. However, it was a tad blustery and along with no cloud cover I knew it would be rather difficult to make anything decent here. After a good few hours and a rather nice coffee I decided to head for the coast as the evening forecast for anywhere else was dull and overcast. Whitby felt like a good idea but having recently visited there I knew any images from or of the piers risked a huge crane in the way (I believe they’re repairing East Pier lighthouse?). I decided therefore to take a look around Saltwick Bay....

Anybody that has read my past blogs will know that I’m a keen advocate of the Panasonic range of cameras. Owning a G1 for the last two years I’ve always found the operation of the camera absolutely ideal for landscape photography. Of course this doesn’t mean I’ve given up on Large Format (not by any means!), but there are times I find it useful to use digital – particularly when I wish to make panoramic images or simple abstracts as mentioned in last week’s blog (oh for the want of a Phase One back – all donations gratefully received! ;). For the last five years my wife has been using a Panasonic compact camera for taking general family snapshots which she found very easy to operate and carry about. However, recently we found problems with the white balance when images were downloaded onto the computer. Therefore, we decided to call it...