I recently took part in an RPS Talk-Walk-Talk event theme on ‘Woodland’. Following a fantastic online talk by Paul Mitchell, a number of walks convened to celebrate British woodland. Organised by John Rutherford, a number of us met for a sortie to Bolehill Quarry in the Peak District, with an optional brief foray down into Padley Gorge.

The weather had not been promising for the last few days but after a wet drive to the location car park, the weather graced us with a break in the rain and some transitioning lighting conditions. It was an enjoyable day, allowing for some great connection, chat and image making. Just to highlight our luck, the heavens began to open again as we pulled away from the car park.

The final phase of the TWT saw us reconvene online to talk through the images we had each selected from the day trip. I was fortunate enough to have one of my images chosen to go into the online RPS zine representing the event. You can see the zine here.

A selection of my images from the day is shown below.

The image files I created that day made me reflect for the first time, that my jpeg presets, biased towards higher contrast, were too strong, at least for these scenes. Mostly I am very happy with my default settings but for the subdued tones and colours in these images I found myself preferring the subtlety shown in the raw files than the jpegs, not always the case but in the main, and worked a few of them up from the raw file. This is something that I shall think about more in the field now, adjusting the presets a little depending on the scene and the lighting. I would still prefer to do this in the field and be happy with the jpeg output, than spend more of my time on the computer processing every raw file. For me, photography is in the moment rather than at the desk later; that’s for the writing and sequencing.