So the previous post got me thinking … walking trips, waterfalls, compact digital … what else did I have on file that might turn into colour mosaics.

So about 7 years ago I did an odd walking holiday to the Yorkshire Dales. Why odd?  Unlike the awful JustForYou holiday it was no one’s fault really. The holiday company was http://www.colletts.co.uk/?gclid=CMG489eelLsCFU_ItAodiUcAnA and I have done a couple of trips with them and they do an excellent job … good food, nice accommodation and friendly walk leaders. Just chance though, my group was mostly full of ultra keen, ultra fit walkers, mostly older than me (embarrassing) and they wanted to walk, hard; so if I wanted to spend a time to stand and stare then I lost my struggle to keep up and just plain got left behind. Nice bunch though, so ‘odd’ yet no complaints.

So my photo opportunities were a bit curtailed, but we did have a brief lunch by East Gill Fall near Keld in Swaledale, and I got a chance to take a whole 2 or 3 photos before it was time to sprint on. And I found this image and worked on it. It needed quite a lot of cropping, particularly to remove an unsightly fence just above the fall; the eye/brain tend to edit out what they don’t want to see, but the camera is just mechanics and software. And I tweaked the colour, contrast, brightness, and more, but still the image never got beyond OK. So I tried flipping it to black&white and … pow! … the feel of the image changed totally, the impact from taking out the colour gave it a bygone days feel, and without colour to distract it became all about texture and pattern. Lovely.

I’ll add a second photograph taken just down the valley from the above. Flipping to black&white did not have quite the same impact, yet it did give the bygone days feel again, and solved a nasty problem whereby the branches of the tree that thrusts through the skyline had gone a weird blue and nothing I could do would get rid of it.