Chris Sutcliff

The Lakes is my favourite spot in England, it’s outstanding beauty perfectly balanced with the amount of pubs it throws at you. I quickly realised that I could take a million photos of majestic mountains and waterside pontoons and bore everyone to death, so here are just a couple of the good ones that don’t repeat a theme. I still don’t have good editing software. You’ll just have to imagine they are better.

This was on the veranda of our hotel. I pulled the axe and the log out into frame and far enough away from the wood pile to get the background to blur, then laid down prostrate on the floor to take the shot. A Scottish guy and his dog came through the door at the wrong moment, it looked like I was trying not to fall off the planet. He asked me what kind of photography this was, and I did not really have an answer for him, so I just said my legs were tired. A day later we got drunk with him and his wife, because people are ace and so is Gin.

This is a really popular spot a short walk from Keswick lakeshore theatre. It is so popular that there was a long procession of people and dogs lining up to get here, so we had to wait and wait for everyone to get the fuck out of the way for the 1/250th of a second needed to take this shot and make it look peaceful and secluded. It was not peaceful and secluded.

There are more waterfalls in the Lakes than you have had hot dinners, this one is just outside of Ambleside town centre. There had been several attempts at getting long exposure shots to work all weekend, this one was by far the most successful. We stayed here too long and annoyed people. Photographers are awful scum.

All these shots represent attempts to improve composition or get more interesting technical results. I feel like I’m getting a better idea at what will or won’t be too terrible, and making better decisions at how to capture them. Onwards and sideways, you know how it goes.

Amy agreed to be my model without knowing that I had never directed a model before. It turns out that is quite a difficult skill to just wing on the day, so I didn’t know where she should look or how she should look or how long anything was going to take. She stared into the sun too long because of a certain shot I wanted to get and was reduced to tears. She might not be my model again.

I think this will be my last camera practice post. I’m sort of getting the hang of it all now, and not just because I figured out how to make backgrounds go blurry. My current issue is editing. Apple recently did an iOS update that made photos take up less space on your phone, unfortunately this also meant that they did not format properly on my site. As I can no longer upload photos here from my phone, I cannot use Apple’s pretty good editing software to get the images looking good, nor can they be sent here from my Instagram account. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse. As an interim remedy, I am uploading the pics from my laptop, but it is not an amazing piece of kit and the editing software in the photo folder is basic, to say the least. I have a friend who believes he can get me a decent package that has been ‘borrowed’ from the internet, so it should be all good again soon.

With that in mind, my next photo uploads to this site should be honest to goodness attempts at actual photos that actually look good, otherwise you’re doomed to endless posts of me pratting about making rookie mistakes that both offend and embarrass all my readers. If you’re even still here.

Don’t you just hate it when people show you their holiday photos? What a grotesque, obnoxious and self aggrandising display, a total lack of respect for anyone else’s time and energy. We don’t give a shit about YOUR holiday, that’s why YOU went on it and we fucking didn’t. Anyway, here are mine.

At the end of each day, just as the sun starts to set and the rough seas of the afternoon are calming in readiness for the evening, the women of the village come to the sea to fish for octopus. They use hand lines that they throw out into the bay and then reel straight back in, over and over again, pacing up and down the seafront to cover the greatest allowable area. I followed this lady to the point of looking weird and creepy, taking shot after shot while I adjusted the shutter speed like the hapless novice I am. Eventually I got this image of her silhouetted against the sunset in mid-cast and was super impressed with myself. I ran over and showed her immediately, she seemed utterly perplexed that this was a thing worth getting excited about, which I suppose would happen if you did it every day. I then ran up to her friend and asked if I could take a picture of her too. She gave me a look that suggested I should just piss off instead. Not everyone likes a giddy hippy camera twat getting all up in their face. No sir, they don’t.