Etched by Water - 1

I’m an admirer of the photographic style of Brett Weston, son of Edward Weston, and the high contrast post-processing of this image with a hint of abstraction in the composition is similar to the style to some of his landscape photographs.

This photograph was taken at Water Cum Jolly - what a fantastic name for a place - in the Derbyshire Peak District National Park. It is one of my favourite photography locations. The dale is on the small side but picturesque and the river widens where the River Wye is held back by a weir built to provide a reliable water supply to drive the waterwheel powering Cressbrook Mill, built by Richard Arkwright in 1779 and until the mid 1960’s it produced high quality cotton for lace making. The mill has since been converted into luxury apartments.

I don’t produce many monochrome images but they work so well with this sort of subject matter. I used a shutter speed of half a second to give the river just enough time to reveal an etching of its path downstream. The volume of water in the River Wye affects the flow over the weir and changes over time. Combine that with the specific characteristics of the light at the moment the shutter is released and it becomes very difficult to exactly recreate the photograph in the future.