Peak District life
Moving home
I’d had a dream for some time to move out to a rural village location.
To me, with a passion for landscape photography, the notion of living in the countryside felt like a natural next step in my life.
Long story short, a sequence of unrelated events, an alignment in the stars and a dollop of good luck and timing, resulted in me moving home to a little village in the Peak District, in October 2024.
It didn't happen overnight, I had been planning the move for two and a half years, giving up on the idea as a lost cause on multiple occasions during that period.
Now that the move has happened, what better reason to resurrect the blog part of A Little Notebook and add a few notes on my ‘closer to home’ experiences as I settle in to a new rural life in a quaint village, where I am most certainly the new kid on the block.
Using the medium of writing when sharing my more homely experiences feels more appropriate - a bit like a journal.
Vlogging would feel rather self centred and give the impression of self importance. Rest assured, my life is not that interesting and I'd much prefer writing about the people, cultures and places that I meet.
When I create photography and video content, I am much more relaxed about doing so when the subject matter is about something other than me, for example, a journey or photo location.
First winter
I am experiencing my first season and winter here. Christmas and New Year have just passed. My residency has just crept over the three month mark.
My house, built in 1760, is in generally good order. Much of my old furniture had been in storage and went up in smoke due to an arson attack on the storage facility in 2022. So during my first months I was slowly making my home feel like home. The usual activities of getting new furniture and decorating took up much of my spare time.
Incidentally, I have not as yet set up a room as a studio for my photography, but that's my next project. I've already committed the study for this purpose.
Videos and photo trips
Fortunately, I also had some spare time to edit photos and video from my recent photo trips. I’ve just uploaded to You Tube parts 1 and 2 from my trip to Slovenia. I probably have material for a further eight videos from trips already completed, including Norway and the Arctic Circle.
My first weekend of 2025
On Saturday, I took delivery of a large supply of logs and smokeless coal just before the snow and deep freeze arrived.
My upbeat mood that morning was somewhat deflated when my neighbour appeared, announcing that he was departing to get petrol for his electricity generator.
"Here", he said, "when it snows, it snows!". With some urgency, I nervously shuffled off to check my wine supplies.
After a busier than usual morning organising fuel, i spent the afternoon faffing around and video editing, before drinking a delicious but strong Armenian wine.
A wintery afternoon
After an afternoon of gossip and laughter with no less than ten locals today, I got stuck into clearing the snow.
A farmer with a snow plough had helpfully cleared the road this morning, only to pile it up along any unsuspecting car parked on the side.
Here's what the village looked like last night.
Here is what it looked like this afternoon at 3pm. That's my rental car.
More snow coming
There is a slight thaw at the moment, but freezing temperatures are expected later with heavy snow for four hours, starting 5am. That's followed by several days of temperatures dropping to minus 7° Celsius.
Guests are often frustrated at my reluctance to start the fire before an evening. But for the second time since moving to the Peak District, I'm burning logs and coal already at 3pm, like a pro arsonist. It's cold here.
By 10pm, we'd had an unexpected and very heavy downpour of rain and was forecast to continue until 5am. A stream ran down what had been the village road. Temperatures were 1 or 2°Celsius above freezing, but that's would change.
From 5am, 0° Celsius was forecast, along with heavy snow for a few hours, then continued light snow throughout the remainder of the freezing day.
Snow upon ice.
April fool - and my blog starts here
It would be an understatement to say that getting my website off the ground has been a slow process; probably three years of slow in fact. I started with good intentions but a multitude of life events, including the mundane, seemed to get in the way, or at least I allowed them to.
So what is to come?
To make amends I will try to add an entry here more regularly. I won’t attempt to retrospectively blog about all my photography escapades over the last three years. Some of these are already documented on my YouTube channel. However, the latter usually cover special photography trips. For example, I have videos (most still needing to be edited) from locations such as Scotland, Slovenia and Madeira. As of writing, I have uploaded two from Scotland 2023 and a third is to follow. Similarly, I reckon that there will be three videos each from the other two trips (where were awesome!).
Why do I film videos (or ‘vlog’)
I enjoy taking photos; it’s a long process from scouting locations, hiking out, searching for a composition that looks ok and then going through the technical bit of dialing in camera settings before pressing the shutter. I imagine it’s a bit like fishing – most days you come back with nothing. But its therapeutic. Videography is more difficult!
The videos you might see from me are not posted because I am an egotistical individual or someone who has misplaced ambitions to be a social media star. I just enjoy the process, and nothing gave me more of a sense of fulfilment than when I’d show a video to my best fan and harshest critic, my late mum.
There are so many videos that I never published and were only shown to my mum. During her final weeks and months in hospital when I’d visit her daily, usually twice a day, I’d take my laptop and after a chat I’d ask her if she’d like to watch a video – of somewhere beautiful and of nature – not of the inside walls of a hospital ward. Some days she’d have the strength to watch and some days, increasingly so, she’d not have the strength.
“My photography and the odd video are a form of therapy and escapism to me ”
My photography and the odd video are a form of therapy and escapism to me – from the mundane day to day challenges of this fast paced and crazy world but also from some of the more challenging times, such as my mum’s final journey.
Link to my Scotland playlistWhy are your videos so infrequent?
For one, I am an amateur who does not rely on regularly uploading YouTube videos as a means to make money, which is very fortunate really, given the mediocrity of them.
Many of the YouTube videos that I uploaded in 2023 were not very recent. A number were from the end of 2021 - filmed in Scotland between Christmas 2021 and over New Year 2022, after my mum had died and the draw of escaping to somewhere remote and wild was strong. Part of the reason for the delay was my not being in the habit of editing videos and my lack of experience in recording them to ensure smooth continuity. One video typically takes me 16 hours of work – that’s a lot of house work I could be getting on with in the same time!
“One video typically takes me 16 hours of work – that’s a lot of house work I could be getting on with in the same time!”
Ironically, I next returned to Scotland in July 2023 and, whilst still excruciatingly slow, I have managed to upload two of my three videos from there relatively quickly. The third is at my favourite location of the trip and will soon be uploaded. It was a pure joy in a remote location, full of nature and a sort of spiritual calmness – perhaps no surprise that it was close to an old church.
What is scheduled for 2024?
Trips
I have more photo trips planned but I am also in the process of a house move (I think I already mentioned about mundane things getting in the way)! Further details to follow on trips.
I will make sure that I write a blog entry for each of the trips to provide some extra context and story behind those experiences. In the meantime, I’ll start regularly posting entries on some of my current experiences.
Project 35
This is a relatively new idea for me, though no doubt it’s been done a thousand times by others. Basically, it is a project consisting of landscape and street photography taken with a 35mm prime lens.
I had been toying with the idea of simplifying my photography and experimenting with some ‘old school’ prime lenses, with an eye on quality Carl Zeiss glass. For clarity, my main lens set-up comprises the Holy Trinity of lenses for landscape photography and each is a zoom covering ultra wide to telescopic focal lengths.
I had never really tried prime lenses seriously and so, decided to kill two birds with one stone and get a Zeiss 35mm. Now, Zeiss do not manufacture lenses for the Canon R mount system so I opted for a Zeiss 35 Biogon F/2.8 prime lens. This is designed for the Leica M mount system and so I also bought a M to RF mount adapter.
A further consequence of this choice is that focus is fully manual, though my CanonR6 (like most modern mirrorless cameras) has focus assist via the electronic view finder (EVF) or LCD display. Both focus and aperture settings are dialed in via the lens rings rather than via the camera controls. It is certainly a more tactile, and dare I say authentic, experience.
It is very early days but I will share more soon. Meanwhile, here is one random image that I took at a village in the Peak District National Park in the UK.
