The Artful Engineer

In June I had the opportunity to spend a week in Yorkshire Dales National Park, which included joining a Light & Land photography tour led by Charlie Waite. (Next year’s tour is already on the schedule, if this series of posts convinces you to sign up.) When I visited York last November, I had no idea that I would be back in Yorkshire in less than seven months, but that’s how it turned out.

I will mention what I felt to be the most interesting features of the area as we go along, but the signature feature has to be the dry stone walls. It may not be obvious in the image above, but those walls are not mortared in any way (hence the “dry” in dry stone) they are simply carefully stacked. There are over 5,000 miles of these walls in the Yorkshire Dales and they make wonderful patterns for photographic compositions.

As you will see over the coming posts, the weather that week was generally warm and sunny, but our first day out and about was mostly overcast and occasionally rainy. I’m glad I caught that bit of inclement weather, though, because it resulted in images that are very different than the ones captured the rest of the week. In the image below, the successive walls progressively fade into the rain. In retrospect I wish that I had either focus stacked this image or used a smaller aperture so that the first wall would be sharper. But since the rain softens the overall image, it probably doesn’t matter.

One of the interesting geologic features of the area is the limestone pavements, where a layer of limestone is exposed on the surface but has been eroded and dissolved by water to the point that the layer is broken up. This next image is an example, although this one is a little far gone to really look like a “pavement.” I will have more examples in the coming weeks, but they also make interesting compositions. Unlike the regularity of the walls, however, these are wonderfully irregular. You could spend hours poking around in the rocks looking for compositions. This is made somewhat harder by the necessity of watching where you step. Did I mention there are a lot of sheep? Better sheep dung than rattlesnakes, but it does get tedious.

I like this next composition a lot. I don’t recall featuring a single tree in this manner before—I usually include the whole tree, or sometimes just the top of the tree or the bottom of the tree, but not just one side of it. The bit of rain in the air helps provide both atmosphere and separation from the background. The couple rocks in the bottom left and the small clump of trees in the upper left also help fill those otherwise empty corners. The dark trunk and surrounding shadowed ground have the most contrast in the image, so that is where the eye is initially drawn and the viewer can explore from there, following the curve of the ground and the distant woods around the periphery of the tree. I think that is why it is important to include the trunk in this image. Given how well this worked, I’ll have to play with more of these 60%-of-a-tree compositions in the future.

This next image definitely conveys “windswept,” which is probably what I should have titled it: a rocky hillside covered in low grass under a gray sky and a bent-over tree that, even in the heart of summer, has barely any leaves. Despite that, the first thing I thought of was a wizard, arms raised and ready to unleash a blast of fire. But now, for some reason, it makes me think of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future.

This next image is one of my favorites from the whole trip. I have no idea how this building ended up in this state: it looks like a giant stomped on the front half of it, but that is probably not what happened, so the mystery remains. The wet, rainy weather is perfect here. It is hard to decide which detail is the most important, but the ones that stand out are the ladder and the shape of the roofline. With the way that the roof is sagging and bent over at the peak, it reminds me of a wizard’s hat. (I am apparently fond of wizards.)

Later that evening, the weather did break. This encouraged me to head out on a walk and I found this stone barn and beautiful cloud that was still catching light from the already-set sun.

Thanks for following along. I’ll have lots more images to share from Yorkshire in the coming weeks. If you have a friend that would like to see more pictures of stone walls and such, please point them at my blog.