We’re planning on heading to Wastwater next week. Just over a year ago, we braved the screes as part of ‘Seeing Seven Trees’. If you don’t know the screes, here’s a rough outline: they are fields of boulders, stones as big as washing machines, precariously balanced on one another, somehow standing still while clinging to the hillside at an angle of over 35 degrees. To make the journey just a bit more challenging, the day we walked these giant stones were rimed with sheet ice. I made a few notes ...

... hands down, eyes down, we carefully pick our way across these huge, loose boulders. Spewed up during dramatic geological upheavals around 400 million years ago they now look inaccessible, and feel it too, jumbled together with wide ankle-snapping crevices between them, and surfaces like rounded ice-rinks. A rumble, and the clank-clonk of falling stones follows Rob’s lost footing and brings me to my senses. Below, the lake is black and cold. My mind flits to a vision of me falling crack-slap-snap, and I pull it back to the moment, to this step, and to the next one.

As my hand slips on the icy top of another boulder, my left foot finds an unexpected cleft and is wedged, jarring and then holding my body. I free myself, then my right foot finds the same hole and is snagged. The journey feels tough and it is hard to believe this is England, 2011. In the distance, the fells look benign, gentle. Here, in the freezing shadows, there is no time to stop and dream: concentration is everything.

After more than an hour struggling through the frozen boulder field, we’re relieved to make it out and to feel soft grass and a kinder gradient. We explore an oak, above us to the right – and know it will become the second of our seven trees. Thick trunk and curved solid branches, one echoing the line of the hill beyond. I count six leaves, brittle, brown, still holding on despite the winter’s chill, fluttering in the breeze. The light, finally over the ridge behind us, makes the tree glow, and we rest and take it in. The minutes of stillness feel golden and the sun warms my back. A child’s laugh drifts across the lake, and Rob’s clicking camera pin-pricks the silence.

I lose myself with my small camera, catching the wide sky and the panorama of hills, and small details: curled brown leaf against litchen; an old acorn cap tipping a spindly branch; bright heads of the serpens moss; dark veins in the trunk. Seeing through the camera helps me linger, helps me appreciate the beauty of what I see, and get to know this tree: The Wasdale Oak.

It’s getting late, time to leave. We weigh up the options: back the way we’ve come, or continue east, which will take us to the end of the lake in around 90 minutes. We know that trying to cross the screes again would be asking for trouble – they’ll get more treacherous as the temperature drops and the light fails – so we head east. The bracken is burnished, and then dulls as shadows grow and the setting sun disappears into a reddening sky. The final push takes us to the pub for a well-earned pint of Wastwater Gold. Perfect.

Now, a year later, we may not walk quite so far – we’re there for a different reason: we’re getting married, with the screes as our backdrop.

Posted by Rob

Following on from Harriet’s blog last week I thought it only right and proper for me to talk about where my original drive to become a photographer came from.

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I picked up my first camera, a plastic Halina, aged 14 and just started playing around with it. I had always loved art, but just could not draw or paint (still can’t), so here – in the form of that fixed lens, cheap image recorder – was a tool to show how I saw the world. I was hooked.

Spin forward a few years to myself as a spotty, callow 17 year-old, giddy on the promise of life, love and football. I stumbled upon a copy of Joel Meyerowitz’s wonderful book Cape Light, which, in some spellbinding way, changed the course of my life. I was nothing short of mesmerised by the beautiful sense of space and light conveyed by the large format images – each and every picture quietly spoke from the pages, each perfectly composed masterpieces

For some reason I did not buy the book at the time - I was probably broke and I had a motorbike that constantly needed fixing – so imagine my joy to find it back in print in 2002, complete with an interview with Joel himself on the making of the ‘perfect’ images. A copy soon arrived in the post and I was not disappointed; my sense of awe and wonder remained.

And looking through it again as I write this piece easily persuades me of the power that a single image can possess in telling a story, perfectly capturing a moment in time.

Can photography be considered art? Of course it can. Just leaf through the pages of Cape Light to understand why.

http://www.joelmeyerowitz.com/photography/book_2.asp

Posted by Harriet

Many years ago (almost thirty) I was sitting at a desk, the old wooden type with smoothed lid, an ink well and a groove for pens, and the inevitable graffiti of daydreaming students who’d been there before me. The class was English, the teacher uninspiring, sadly. I was dulled by her monotone drone and her inability to see beneath and between words as I did; but she did, on one day, introduce me to the poem ‘Utah’ by Anne Stevenson, which has sat with me ever since.

It instantly transported me to endless expanses of brown, rocky land, with skeletal trees outlined by the single blue of a wide sky. I became the child in the poem, stuck between a sense of everything and nothing, paralysed by the enormity of a feeling that has no words. I felt the others around me, with their dreams, thoughts and regrets; and the simple breath of the moment.

I wrote to Anne Stevenson to thank her for her inspiration, and to tell her that we chose the name ‘somewhere-nowhere’ because of this poem. She replied, almost instantly:

'Dear Harriet,

It is always heartening to hear from an unknown reader that a poem of mine has reached her. So thank you very much. I wonder where you live in this open world?'

Her poetry does capture the openness of the world; the possibilities it holds; the wonder of landscape; the power of feeling. In many ways a simple poem is like a picture: it’s worth a thousand words. Something we want to convey with somewhere-nowhere.

Here’s the poem.

Utah

Somewhere nowhere in Utah, a boy by the roadside,

gun in his hand, and the rare dumb hard tears flowing.

Beside him, a greyheaded man has let one arm slide

awkwardly over his shoulders, is talking and pointing

at whatever it is, dead, in the dust on the ground.

By the old parked Chevy, two women, talking and watching.

Their skirts flag forward, bandanna twist with their hair.

Around them, sheep and a fence and the sagebrush burning

and burning with a blue flame. In the distance, where

mountains are clouds, lightning, but no rain.

Anne Stevenson

Posted by Rob

For many years the little yellow and red logo of Kodak has been synonymous with photography. The brand has frozen forever millions of defining moments in history, classic sporting occasions, iconic stars and treasured family events. It has been part of my growing up and part of my development (pun intended) as a photographer. I’ve never totted up how many rolls of Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Tri-x and T-Max I’ve put through my cameras, but it must run into thousands. I’ve still got some of the slides that I shot on my first ‘proper’ camera – a tank-like Zenit E. I’ve still got the camera too, come to think of it.

So it was with more than a touch of sadness that I heard of the company’s plight. It comes as little shock though, as they’ve failed to adapt to the changing photographic horizon. The digital revolution seems to be passing them by. In contrast their great rivals from across the other side of the Pacific, Fuji, seems to be growing stronger.

Like all photographers I have had to adapt to new technology, but unlike most I still love to use film. There is something innately good about handling film, considering each and every image taken, not knowing exactly what you are getting after pressing the shutter. I also love the tactile nature of developing monochrome film and then seeing an image come to life in a red-lit tray. Am I alone in revelling in the smell of stop bath?

Digital is a wonderful innovation, with amazing applications. It is now King. But film will always hold a special place in my heart, especially those that popped out of a little yellow box.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/19/kodak-why-moment-has-passed