First shots have quite blue cast, though it's natural in those late hours of day in shadows I'd adjust it bit.
These icicles look dangerous, I have habit in conditions where they form to look up when walking in city streets, we have quite many poorly insulated houses which create these dangerous icicles and if you happen to be in wrong place at wrong time then consequences could be bad.

I for one like second shot, this red coat makes that shot for me, like something from sin city...

This is my favorite, love it.

Thanks Vahur.
These were processed quickly with an ipad. I'll have another look on a real computer when I get home, but this was the blue hour :-)
These particular icicles are not dangerous. If they should fall they'll land in a small overgrown garden that is locked up in winter. But generally, as you said one should be careful and keep an eye open when walking in villages like this :-)

The colour of rivers is surprisingly variable. Peaty water in flood can sometimes look like coffee granita 😁 or seething cooking jam😬! I'll take my tea (but not my rivers) with a dash of milk 😀

The watery flame is a wonderful title, fits perfectly, and a great image too.

Dodging The Showers On Heapey Moor

As mentioned in my earlier post, a break in the rain was forecast for this afternoon, so I decided to take the GFX100S for its inaugural visit to Heapey Moor, to see how manageable it would be.

I took the body with the GF45-100 f/4.0 (35-80 equiv) attached, but also brought the GF32-64 f/4.0 (25-55ish) and 100-200 (80-160), not to mention the obligatory tripod that I feel I need to use with this camera in order to get my moneys worth from that 102MP sensor, roughly around 6KG of stuff, which felt kind of heavy after swinging around just the E-M1 MKII + 12-100 yesterday (and some people claim that lens is too big!.

Anyway, the good news is it was manageable as long as I took my time. I guess I wouldn't want to run up there with it, mind you I wouldn't want to run anywhere with my currently level of fitness and, apart from getting hit with a brief shower at the beginning of the walk, the forecast was good and it stayed pleasant and dry for the next three hours that it took me to cover about three miles.

I made it as far as Drinkwater's. By that time, the sun was setting and the wind was picking up, so I turned around and headed back down to White Coppice. I could have got all the way to Great Hill if I hadn't run out of time.

The ironic thing is, out of the three lenses I was carrying I used just the 45-100, the other two never came out of the bag. That 35-80 range covers most of what I need in this sort of scenario. Fortunately, it's a really good lens too.

All images taken on a tripod with the Fujifilm GFX100S + 45-100 f/4.0. The riverside shots were taken with a CPL, but that remained in my pocket after I left the river and moved out onto the moors proper. All images processed from individual raw files in Capture One Pro 23.

1. A Murky Start

As I reached Black Brook it began raining, quite heavily actually, so I hung around shooting by the stream to see if it would settle down, which it did in due course. This was looking back towards White Coppice (and Chorley North) as I reached the top of the quarry beside the stream.

2. Black Brook

Black Brook was flowing with some serious vim and vigour. With the wet rocks, heavy pack and expensive camera in hand, I was very careful not to fall in while taking these shots. It's no Strid, but it's quite deep and fast flowing in some places, plus a few of the waterfalls are kinda high, so it's best to keep out of this one.

3. Black Brook #2

This is one situation where maybe an extra 'mm' or two at the wide end might have been beneficial, but I quite liked this framing, even though it is a bit tight.
If only I'd had a wider lens to hand, or more importantly, could have been bothered swapping to it.

4. Blue Skies

Something you don't see around here very often. The broken wall in the foreground, along with Black Brook itself, marks the boundary of White Coppice. Black Coppice on the opposite bank (on the left here) has a similar bounding wall.

5. Great Hill and the Black Brook Valley

This is a new viewpoint that I've somehow never visited in all the years I've been walking these moors. Usually, I'll either cross Heapey Moor by the main and rather muddy path, or I'll follow Black Brook itself, but on this occasion I left the river before it entered the high sided valley shown here and followed a rough trail that runs along the top of the valley, following the boundary fence. Savour the view, because if the holly trees in these tubes take hold it'll be gone forever.

6. Heapey Moor

A 65:24 crop of the view looking back across Heapey Moor towards The Nab, with the Hawthorn tree at Coppice Stile marking its location along the boundary wall. The previous shot was taken from the far side of the tubes you can see near the centre of the image.

7. Playing Hide The Info Sign at Coppice Stile

In true old man stylee I've whinged before about the huge and unsightly information sign that has been erected alongside several of these farm ruins on the moors. The one here is particularly ruinous when included in a shot. In this case it's a huge white slab that looks like a lectern that they've placed adjacent to the tree. As a result I've been experimenting with different viewpoints to try and hide it behind other objects. I've more or less succeeded here, although you can still just see the damn thing poking out from behind the wall (a little white protrusion on the left of the tree).

8. The Breached Dam

This was taken during the final descent down to White Coppice. The large green Toblerone in the middle of the picture is the remains of the dam that use to retain water in a lodge here for use in the mining activities. In 1891 the dam was breached and flooded the hamlet which lies off to the right of the picture. The breach is still visible today, separating the two parts of the dam.

These are my favs this week.

The colours seem richer in this set.
I like #2.
I think #3 would be a better comp if the bottom half was cropped.
But it's the last shot that gets man of the match.

I haven't really gone out of my way to achieve that (no heavy saturation boost). One thing I have discovered is that tweaking the white balance a bit towards yellow and also towards green from what auto picks does give the flora a bit of a boost, particularly faded dead leaves and bracken, they tend to start looking a bit monochrome if that isn't addressed. Auto does a pretty good job, but can leave things looking a bit cold. That said, the white balance presets never look right when applied to my images.

You mean like this? I think I see what you mean, but the swirly turbulence at the bottom of the original image was a major component of the image, although I guess it was fighting for attention against the skeletal trees on the bank. I still think I should have swapped the 45-100 for the 32-64 for this shot as I alluded in my blurb. With a bit more breathing room around the bottom it might have worked better, as it is, it does feel a little bit tight.

I'm glad you like that, I'd packed up my tripod by this point and had to go the extra mile and unpack the damned thing again to take this, so now it seems more worthwhile. I spotted another shot of this dam which may have worked rather well on my way down, but decided I couldn't be bothered unpacking the tripod for that one, I'm sort of wishing I had now.

As WM has said, the colours seem a bit richer in this set. Maybe the result of everything being wet, together with a polariser? You were lucky to get a break in the weather - our forecast clear spell never materialised.

Nos 7 and 8 have a bit of a magenta feel to me - though, of course, it could be my screen…

They are lovely shots, showing what can be done in unpromising conditions in the north-west of England at this time of year. I’m in north Wales and it literally hasn’t stopped raining for the past week.

Another Alan

*presuming this is in response to my post from the moors.

It sounds like it's more than making up for it outside at the moment as it's absolutely chucking it down. We had some pretty wild storms last night too, bringing trees down and cutting power in some of the nearby villages.

If you saw last week's post when I went to The Lake District on what was forecast to be dry and clear weather, but ended up in a blizzard that saw dozens of people getting stranded in their cars, then you'll appreciate I was taking a gamble on trusting the Met Office forecast that there would be a break this afternoon. Fortunately, apart from some initial rain, it turned out to be a lovely afternoon, with some nice soft light.

As sunset approached, it was rather evident that it wasn't going to live up to what had gone beforehand, as the sun was clearly about to hit a thick cloud bank that would suck the life out of proceedings once it had passed that point.

However, to the North, there were substantial clouds and these were high enough to be lit with golden light, which was cast back onto the ground, leading to the magenta tint you spotted in No.8, which was taken about five minutes before the sun dipped below the horizon, but twenty minutes after it had disappeared from view due to the fog bank. In that particular image, I've actually pushed the green / magenta slider towards green a little and the blue / yellow one towards yellow. There are also 11 localised layers applied to that one in order to balance the image out. It's also been heavily lifted in terms of exposure as I'd exposed it for the sky at the back.

This is a before / after comparison of the raw file in C1P (you'll note the before side is rather dark)...

No.7 is straight out of camera in terms of white balance. I liked the cold look the AWB had settled on and didn't see a need to change it, but now you mention it I can see magenta in it too on my calibrated monitor, this seems to be a feature of Fuji's AWB implementation, although often it looks okay and I leave it in (occasionally, where sunsets are concerned I have been known to add more of it). Here's the before / after for that one too. This has six layers of localised adjustments on it. There are three major bands treating the sky, middle distance and foreground, along with a number of layers to bring out details in the tree.

Do you mean richer compared to what I usually post, or richer compared to the E-M1 MKII images I posted earlier in this thread?

In the case of the E-M1 MKII images, those were taken in really, really dull, overcast conditions, so I wasn't expecting very much from them, whereas the GFX pictures were taken in quite nice light and have clearly benefitted from it.

It's also fair to say that many much better photographers than myself, have commented that the GFX100S produces very malleable images that you can draw a lot out of and I tend to agree from my experience over the last few months, they do have a quality to them that seems to make them easy to edit for a nice look once you've got a feel for what can be pulled out of them.

Of course, the conditions have to be right when the photographs were taken and exposure is important, particularly watching for clipped highlights as it doesn't behave quite the same as any of the other cameras in my fleet in this regard in that there's practically zero latitude with the highlights, but detail and colour can be pulled out of incredibly dark shadows.

Yes, pretty much. The bottom area was nice but the stream leads the eye to that beautiful tree anyway, I think that is the main focal point for me.

"The Most Electrified Leaf in All of Sports Entertainment."

Excellent title.

A wonderful set, I love your compositions, colours, clouds.. I am glad you spent your money for this kit :) it benefits all of us.

"The Three Faces of Grace"