I’m not going to lie. It was bloody freezing! I wasn’t prepared to tackle the snow on Dartmoor.
This was my first real landscape photography shoot. I knew very little of Dartmoor so had a friend, Daniel Groves, be the guide as he knew the area better.
The day started with a few issues. Firstly we got up at the crack of dawn (I’m not great at waking up at the best of times) to get a bus out to our destination. Turns out the bus only took us so far and didn’t have a way of getting the rest of the way. Luckily one of Dans friends was also up for a walk on Dartmoor so he gave us a lift the rest of the way.
We couldn’t complain though, the sun was shining, the weather was good. It wasn’t too hot and there was a nice cool breeze.
We parked the car, got our kit ready and off we went.
The further we got, the colder it got. Then we could see snow. Now, this confused me. It wasn’t snowing anywhere else we’d been that morning. The further we got, the more the snow we could see. Then the cold wind picked up. The snow on Dartmoor was a few feet deep in places. I hadn’t prepared for that at all and I was wearing a tatty old pair of Nike Air Force 1’s.
The first few stops we made were a bit of a shambles for me. I was throwing my kit around everywhere trying to get set up to take a few photos. I was cold enough to not think properly and the initial bulk of photos I wasn’t impressed with.
A little further up, the wind had died down so we found shelter and stopped for some lunch.
We came across some flooded areas that had created massive ice lakes. We stopped and played around a bit, breaking the ice to see how deep they were. I really like this photo because you can see the different layers of landscape. Firstly the long grass in the snow, then the icy lake and the snow topped hills in the distance.
The Photos
I wasn’t entirely happy with many of the photos I’d taken that day. I’m going to blame it on the cold. They just didn’t capture the sheer scale of the area. Everywhere you looked it was just a spectacular landscape, completely open, bright skies and nothing spoiling it whatsoever. Luckily I tried my hand at taking multiple shots of a scene with the idea of stitching them together in photoshop to create a pano shot. This was the best idea I had all day. I ended up putting a few pano’s together to increase the size of the scene and get that massive openness I was hoping for.
These next two shots concentrate on capturing some of the finer details.
We reached the end of the joinery and headed home. To say I was glad to be in the warm is an understatement! I was ill for a week after this expedition. Note to self, bring appropriate clothing/footwear in future.
