The June 2008 issue of Digital SLR Photography Magazine features one of my images in a Beginners Guide on ISO Ratings. The image is of Cauldron Falls, a waterfall at West Burton in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The image can be found on page 52.

As part of a project I am working on, I shall be visiting as much of the Scottish Highlands and Islands as possible. Over the course of the year I shall be reviewing my time in each area and previewing some of the images that you will later see. The first entry in this series comes from the Isle of Arran.

Arran is a magical island which lies off the Ayrshire coastline in the Firth of Clyde. Arran is often described as ‘Scotland in Miniature’ and it is hard to argue against this, so much is packed into such a small island. Arran can be split into two, the island’s north lies mostly within a National Scenic Area boundary and features a rugged landscape dominated by high peaks and erratics. The south is less rugged, has rolling hills and more forestation. The entire island is surrounded by a varied coastline with some magnificent sandy bay’s such as that found at Lamlash and rocky coves such as Pirates Cove near Corrie.

One major road, the A841 circles the entire island. It is a lovely scenic route with many stunning views across the Firth of Clyde back to the mainland or across Arran Sound to Kintyre. You can also see Ailsa Craig and numerous other islands such as Holy Island or Pladda. If you wish to explore the inner beauty of the island then you will have to use the extensive network of footpaths as very few roads penetrate the islands innards. The rewards of a long trek can be really rewarding with some spectacular scenery especially in the glens such as Glen Sannox. Unfortunately, they can also severely restricted by the weather. On one visit to the Machrie Stones I experienced thunder and lightning, hail, rain and brilliant sunshine within a 20 minute spell that saw me go back to the campsite both sunburnt and soaked. Maybe the stones were exerting some magical powers?

Glen Sannox, North Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa were just three of the glens I explored. Dominated by the high peaks of Goatfell and Caisteal Abhail, the landscape is very rugged and boulder strewn. Glacial activity shaped the glens many years ago and now nature is finally starting to reclaim the land. They are three wonderful locations you just feel compelled to explore and show a hidden beauty of the Scotland that you feel privileged to see.

I spent a good deal of time at Machrie Bay which overlooks Arran Sound to Kintyre, a later port of call on the ‘world tour’. I found Machrie Bay interesting but it was Corrie, Merkland Point and Pirates Cove which intrigued me. The coastline is dominated by granite erratics which were deposited onto exposed sandstone rocks by glacial activity almost 9000 years ago - it is a remarkable sight full of colour and mystery. It is also a great area to see seals.

Overall I enjoyed my time on Arran, it’s a great island with lots to discover. Due to time constraints I feel i’ve only scratched the surface and there is so much left for me to explore. This will have to wait for another day which will hopefully come soon.

In April 2006, I’d been enjoying a day out in Malham, one of the many picturesque villages in the Yorkshire Dales. For anyone who doesn’t know Malham, the village is surrounded by some of the England’s finest limestone scenery. I’d made quite a few images in Malham but was finished a little earlier than planned so I thought I would drive around and see some more of the local sites. Whist exploring I saw a sign for Scalebar Force so I stopped the car and went to have a look. The waterfall captivated me from the first minute I saw it. It’s quite a high waterfall around 40 feet and has 6 steps, which change the flow and direction of the water. It’s in a small wooded ravine and getting down to the lower level involved a tricky scramble down a muddy bank. Unfortunately, It was a very sunny day not really conducive to photographing a waterfall. The sun’s reflections were bouncing off the water and the surrounding rocks making it almost impossible to get a successful image. I decided to take a few shots to try an establish a great composition that I could come back and capture on another day. Once I’d felt that I’d found that view I decided to head back home thinking about the image that one day I’d make.

In 2006, I used to share my weekends between the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors. If I went to the dales on a saturday, I would be on the moors on Sunday. On this weekend I woke up early on the Sunday morning and headed to Goathland, a village more famously known as Aidensfield in the television programme Heartbeat. I parked up and got myself ready to go down to Mallyan Spout, a nice waterfall which flows over the rocks into West Beck. As I got ready I realised that there was no sign of my tripod in the car. It suddenly dawned on me that I’d left it at Scalebar Force. A landscape photographer without his tripod is almost like a footballer without his boots. Feeling rather stupid I got back in the car and drove the 120 miles or so back to Scalebar Force in the hope it was still there. Suprisingly, at the bottom of the waterfall, there was my tripod. It was a bit wet from the overnight rain but that didn’t matter.

The conditions that day in the dales were extremely overcast and a little bit wet. Fortunately, the rain was just drizzling at the time and I just felt this was a great time to capture the image I had been rehearsing in my head. The overcast conditions ensured that light on the waterfall was even and there were no bright reflections on the water or rocks to contend with. They conditions also ensured that the shutter speed would be slow enough to slightly blur the water without requiring any filters. I composed the image just as I had planned the day and captured the image. There was a huge element of danger to this shot as I was stood on the middle of the beck almost ‘welly’ deep in the water. With thousands of pounds worth of equipment hovering a few inches above the water there is a huge risk albeit an exciting one when you know that a slight slip and that could be the end. Sometimes it’s worth the risk, I call it the ‘He who dares’ approach.

On reflection I like this image a lot. I didn’t try to capture the entire waterfall as many others do but tried to focus in on a smaller but attractive part of the waterfall. It is easy to turn up and feel compelled to fit everything in the frame, I still do it but you don’t need to. I like the flow of the water which is an essential element to capturing waterfall images but what I like more is the colours and texture to the rock. It really compliments the smooth flow of the water. I guess there is a lesson to be to this story somewhere about always looking after your equipment. If this is a rule then sometimes things don’t turn out so bad if you break them!!

Scalebar Force, Settle, Ribblesdale, Yorkshire Dales
Nikon D70, Nikkor DX 12-24mm
Aperture: F22, Shutter Speed 1 sec, Focal Length: 14mm

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Visitors or anyone unlucky enough to be admitted to the NHS Oncology Unit at Castle Hill Hospital, Cottingham, East Yorkshire  will be able to view one of my images. The level 2 reception area will feature an image captured from the bluebell woods at Sowerby-under-Cotcliffe near Northallerton which has been printed onto a formica screen. The development will open shortly and I will get an image as soon as possible.

I’m often asked how particular features of this website were developed and deployed so I thought I would write a little article which gave a little more information. Work started on the site probably 15 months ago (October 2006). I had worked on a few website projects before so I was pretty familiar with website design and promotion and felt that I could do this myself. Unlike other projects I’ve been involved with, financial constraints would not be an issue during development, the major constraint was going to be time. I realised this was going to involve a major trade off between shooting new images and sitting on the computer creating code.

Initially, I sat down with a blank piece of paper and brainstormed what I would like to see on the site. I wanted to make the site both functional and fun. The next step was to decide exactly how I wanted to implement these features and what resources I would need to implement them. This involved a lot of scouring the internet trying various pieces of software and scripts to see if they could operate the way I want. I wanted to make the site easy to use but also to do what it is supposed to do. I use Apple Macs and one of the easiest ways of creating a web site is to use iWeb. Most of the time, constructing a site in iWeb is simply drag, drop and publish. I wanted the site to look consistently great throughout, and because graphic design is not a strong point i felt an iWeb template from 11 Mystics produced a great look at a low cost. Using iWeb was a great time saver particularly when trying different things. You can only imagine how many times I looked at a page and just thought ‘I think I need to start again here!’ because it either looked awful or didn’t work the way I wanted it to. One of the major drawbacks to using iWeb is implementing features that iWeb can not handle, this was particularly a problem in version 1 (which i used). After creating and publishing the pages in iWeb, I used iWebmore. This handy utility allowed me to insert my own code on my pages. I used Bare Bones‘ Textwrangler to edit all of my html/css pages. I added a lot of code such as meta-data, scripts and multimedia objects. Another utility I made good use of is A Better Finder Rename, this has been and will continue to be a huge time saver when renaming files.

You may have noticed this website uses a number of scripts to enhance it’s functionality. That is the key, only use a script where it actually adds value, saying that some of the scripts have been specially selected because not only to do they add functionality but they also have a great look. A couple of scripts i’ll list here have done just that, Highslide JS has been added to allow users to view images at a larger size without leaving the page. It is also great for displaying Ajax/HTML content, for example I use it extensively in the Store pages for frame options and previews. The major benefit to this script is it saves having to create more pages for the user to navigate. Slideshow Pro is a flash plug-in which delivers great slideshows. I have used this in the Portfolio pages and hopefully you will find this an attractive but easy to use feature. There are many other scripts used but the list is so extensive I haven’t the time to mention them all. To quickly summarise, this site includes XHTML, DHTML, PHP/Javascript/Ajax Scripting, uses a heap of MySQL databases. It has over 2000 pages, weighs in at 9.5 GB in size.

I have just updated the blogging software to Wordpress so the blog will be easier to update regularly and I look forward to posting more. The site is not quite finished just yet, I will be adding a few exciting new features/products by the end of March(ish) and will continue refining the site on an ongoing basis. There are also a few features that will get some serious reconstructive surgery over the course of the year. In the mean time the work goes on, images need capturing, the site needs promoting and I need a bit of sleep!!!

Firstly, a very ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone.

Secondly, the ‘Beautiful Yorkshire’ exhibition run by North Yorkshire County Council begins on January 14th and will last until May 31st. The picture below, Roseberry Topping from Cliff Ridge, Great Ayton, will be on display at the following North Yorkshire County Council libraries on the respective dates:-

Malton, Northallerton and Whitby: 14 Jan - 2 Feb
Knaresborough, Richmond and Scarborough: 11 Feb - 1 Mar
Selby, Stokesley and Filey: 10 Mar - 29 Mar
Ripon, Pickering and Skipton: 7 Apr - 26 Apr
County Record Office (Northallerton) and Bentham: 6 May - 24 May
Harrogate: 12 May - 31 May

If you are in any of these places on these dates please go and have a look.

A new feature to the James Paul Photography website is the ability to create your own custom calendar for 2008. Calendars are available in two styles, standard or premium and feature the ability to choose any image from a palette of 75 for each month. This means you can select the images that you want or fit within your particular theme. In addition, there is also the ability to add your own events and holidays to the calendar. This can be your country’s holidays or your own custom events such as birthdays or sporting fixtures etc.

Visit the Calendar page to try out this new feature.

Two of my images were selected to appear in the 6th October 2007 issue of Amateur Photographer magazine (on sale Tuesday 2nd October 2007). They are part of the gallery section of the magazine. One image (below) Saltburn Pier has been selected to receive the ‘Editor’s Choice‘ award.

North Yorkshire County Council have been running a photography competition over the last few months in their free newspaper, the NY Times. The competition was judged by Joe Cornish and the image below, Roseberry Topping from Cliff Ridge, Great Ayton was selected as one of 5 images to be ‘Highly Commended’. These five images plus the winning entry will be exhibited in an exhibition which will tour North Yorkshire’s libraries. More details on the exhibition will appear later.

Congratulations to the winner, Tristan Campbell of Harrogate.

Photographers, particularly landscape photographers feel an affinity with nature - it’s what we strive to capture. Without nature the British landscape would look considerably different. Imagine May Beck and Falling Foss with without the gorgeous carpet of autumnal coloured leaves that grace a late October morning.

I realise that as much as I like to capture the landscape I am also using the landscape as a resource. Every framed print I produce is made from the finest wood, every calendar, greeting card or digital print is printed on a sheet of paper or card. Every product has some level of impact on the population of trees. To give something back I am now supporting the ‘Trees for All‘ campaign run by the Woodland Trust and announcing the following:

For every print purchased, whether mounted, unmounted or framed, a tree will be dedicated through the ‘Trees for All’  campaign at no extra cost to the purchaser. The dedication can be made to the purchaser or given as a gift. The recipient will be able to choose from approximately 20 different woods in which to have a tree dedicated.