Semi Aborted Ilkley
So we manage to get out onto Ilkley Moor at about 5.30pm on Sunday and walked up to the ridge. On the way up we saw quite a few flying ants and as we approached the ridge the ground was teeming with them. Not to be deterred, we setup at the top of the ridge and I went ahead and set up for a photograph. I’m still paranoid at the chance of the tripod falling over and add to that my inexperience, the whole process was a little fraught (including the 100ft drop 2ft to my left). I decided to use the Acros black and white film to begin with and tested my exposure settings on the 5D which seemed to be OK. Apart from forgetting to lift the darkslide everything went OK. There appeared to be a lot more insects flying around though. We decided to head down to the bottom of the bank where there is an old quarry area with pine trees and cotton grass but stopped on the way to take a photograph looking down the river. At this point the wind dropped and obviously this was the only thing holding back the bugs. I have never seen so many insects in my life, At one point I had my head in the dark cloth and was accompanied by over 10 that I could see. And these were starting to bite. This, and the heat inside my dark cloth, added to the levels of frustration and after I accidentally forgot to close the shutter on one slide of Velvia 100 I gave up. We tried stopping again on the way back to the car but the midges were everywhere now. Charlotte ended up with over 30 bites and I’ve got a few here and there.
The big lessons learned were that you have to have a check list in your head. If you don’t, things will go wrong. The second thing was that there are lots of things that have to be put away whilst you are taking a shot (loupe, darkcloth, filmholder, film, lenscover, rearplate, ) and it would be nice to have somewhere to put some of them. To this end I’ve ordered the Gnass quick load holder (as seen in the Dykinga book). I also need to get better at ‘seeing’ upside down. At the moment I found it difficult to locate a crop that I’d seen with my eyes (or camera). This will come with practise I think. Finally, working with a view camera is a bugger for your back and I think I’ll have to either get the tripod working higher up or sit down to take the photographs (I broke my back 10 years ago and have three vertebrae fused together and two mashed discs – generally OK but bending over very slightly is one of the worst positions).
