|| Drier and cool || That's more like it ||

|| Focus On... ||

Early Mornings

Well, we asked for some better weather, and the weekend delivered. Feels like a long time since that happened. I’m so used to just moaning about the weather that it actually caught me off guard! The weekend also delivered a couple of fairly remarkable early mornings, which for the first time in what feels like ages I was able to make the most of.

Being fully signed up to the delayed gratification long-haul discipline of Large Format photography means I can’t share those images with you quite yet. I’ve got a box of undeveloped film accumulating on my shelf, and an unopened set of fresh chemicals which I need to combine together first. Before that can happen I need to fix a broken film processor using parts salvaged from another broken film processor, which crucially is broken in a slightly different way to the first. So, for the time being we’ll have to slum it with some digital photos while I sing the praises of the fleeting beauty of the early winter mornings in the Peak.

We talk a lot in winter about how snow instantly transforms the familiar landscapes we know and love into something totally different overnight. That’s nothing though - on the right day the sunrise can pick the landscape up, turn it upside down, shake it about, and then put it right back where it should be in a matter of minutes. Functionally speaking, the sunrise and the sunset should just be the opposite of each other. One’s the boot-up sequence, the other is the shut-down. But this characterisation fails to recognise the special tricks the sunrise has up its sleeve.

You won’t have to have been climbing on the gritstone edges of the Pennines for long to cotton on to the fact that, broadly speaking, the crags tend to face west. So we tend to think of epic sunsets when we think of gritstone. And it is magic when you get a good ‘un. We’ve all experienced it, as a quick scan of Instagram stories of an evening will usually illustrate. But sunrises are different. It’s not just a sunset played in reverse. The light can be totally different. The air heavier from moisture overnight, the frost and mist haven’t been baked off yet. So that does something to the light and how it plays over the land. The way the light builds and the colour palette moves through the gears; it’s worth experiencing now and again. Throw in a bit of rolling fog or a cloud inversion and then you’ve got the light and the landscape changing on multiple dimensions on the fly. Fragile, unpredictable, sublime. Forgetting about photography for a second, just being out with no particular purpose and witnessing it can be really special. If you think taking in a classic grit sunset is life affirming then that’s nothing compared to strutting around all day smug in the knowledge you were up for an amazing sunrise that visually everyone you meet that day wasn’t privy to.

Because of course if there’s a problem with sunrises it’s that they aren’t very user friendly. This is not like getting your kicks from on-demand streaming, there’s not an app to hook you up with a willing local sunrise any time of day or night. They’re too early most of the year, and when they’re not that early they’re freezing cold and hence in direct competition with a warm bed. Putting a thick quilt on a comfy bed is like taking voluntary redundancy from winter sunrise photography. Gotta sleep shivering under a thin sheet with an achingly full bladder really to force yourself to get up. Monumental levels of motivation are often required. Not all heroes wear capes etc.

Also, let’s not fall into the trap of looking at our weather app and noting that, say, sunrise is only at 7am at the moment, so that’s not that early really. Yeah it’s not.... if you own a teleporter to magic yourself into position, camera in hand. The reality is you’ve got to wake up much earlier to decide if it’s worth going out in the first place, and that means an hour or two before sunrise depending how far you’ve got to travel, at which point it’s dark so you might not actually be able to tell what the prospects are like. So you’re going to have to commit anyway, and leave enough time to scrape the ice off the car, drive out, walk in, etc etc. You get out bleary eyed, barely functioning at a cognitive level, wind stabbing at your face, unable to think straight. Then as you stagger up to some hilltop jumble of rocks and turn to the south east you see in horror that a bank of low cloud has rolled in over Nottinghamshire and that’s that - sunrise is cancelled.

But at least you just get to be out at that time, because it’s always a bit special in that wherever you are there’s a good chance you’ll have the place to yourself. Unless you’re on Bamford Edge of course, where the TikTok fans will already be up there filming pre-dawn selfies before you’ve left the comfort of your car (incidentally I’m being serious here). You might of course bump into some keen climbers; what a bunch of nutcases eh!?! Last winter I was prowling around for a while along the top of Burbage West pre-sunrise in -4 degree temps looking for a composition worthy of taking my big gloves off to setup the camera before I realised there was already a guy trying West Side Story. And this weekend as I headed back down to the car from Stanage at 8am, keen to warm the hands up on the car’s blowers, there was already at least one party topping out on a trad route. I suppose the fabled Gaskins 4am Brandenburg Gate sessions are now writ so large on climbing folklore that they inspire these feats of keenness, but maybe that’s topic for another day.

|| New Topos ||

A couple of things I've been working on of late are some additions to the Rockfax App - crags which didn't or couldn't be added to the recent print guide. Check out more details here.