The night before, I'd checked the usual sources of weather forecast and it looked as if there'd be clear skies the following morning, but nontheless I set an alarm early so that I could check the radar estimates, rather than give up entirely and have a lazy lie-in. When I woke up and had a look, some low cloud had indeed moved in across the central Lakes. I had a look at the Blencathra webcam, which is quite useful for its low light visibility (you can see stars in the sky if it's a clear night. If only all webcams were that good!) and the sky was actually clear. But on the Ambleside webcam it seemed fairly clear from the faint outlines in the gloomy image that this was where the low cloud was hanging. I waited a while, and monitored it, and eventually around 7am I noticed the brighter light of a cloud gap on the southern horizon that the webcam very briefly pans towards. This was enough to get me out of bed and off in the car to at least drive to Ambleside and see for myself how it was looking.
Yep, it was looking good. A sky covered in low cloud apart from a widening gap on the horizon. Knew that one of the best options at fairly short notice was to head to Side Pike for the view looking towards Blea Tarn. Zoomed off around Chapel Stile, the safer and far easier approach to Blea Tarn, and parked up before the steep curving road that leads up to Side Pike. No way I'm risking that after a frosty night in winter in my lowly Corsa. Hiked up in a hurry the rest of the way, cursing that I'd forgotten to bring a drink. Powered up Side Pike and set up, where a friend of mine was, evidently had the same idea!
The view is one that I like very much, with how the old stone wall frames the bottom of the scene and gives some foreground interest, with Blea Tarn sitting in the middle above it. I'd never shot this in winter before and I loved how there was just the right amount of fresh snow to "paint" the stone wall and also cover the surrounding area.
The gap on the horizon started to widen a bit too much at this point, but thankfully a good mount started to catch colour just as the sun was rising. Here's a shot of how it first looked before the sun came up.
After waiting a while longer, it looked as if some accumulating cloud was blocking the sun in the distance, and time was ticking by for that "golden hour" tone of light. But pleasingly just in the nick of time the sun started hitting the scene and catching the fells. It was also at this point that the sun was now coming over the left hand side (Lingmoor Fell) so I made the decision to slightly widen my composition to include the sun.
This I think ended up working quite nicely as the sun nicely balanced the frame, and I also liked how the golden light was beginning to catch the facets of the stone wall and the wintery bracken beyond it.
This was about as good as it got, and any sort of atmosphere was lost beyond this brief moment.
I headed down with my friend and we decided to walk over to the shoreline of Blea Tarn, which was evidently fully frozen over, to see if there was any shots to be had involving the icy edges of the tarn.
Frustratingly the Langdale Pikes became mostly smothered in drifting low cloud, but some nice light did frequently play across the sides of the valley, and fortunately I just found an interesting composition in time, where an outlet of running water was coming down off the bank and creating interesting patterns and gaps in the ice. I framed it up and made sure to focus stack right from the closest detail.
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