First published February 2012 – Llynnau Mymbyr Sunrise and Alport Castles Sunset

As a landscape photographer I quickly get a list of images “I Must Shoot” and a lot of these could be revisits to locations. It could be either the first time I had visited it hadn’t be quite right or while on location I’ve pre-visualised an image I would quite like and this means playing the waiting game especially if it requires a certain season. The title of this blog is so because all the images below have taken literally years to make, but are captured within seconds.

The first image is of Alport Castles in the Peak District. I had been here twice before, but both times on a walk though was armed with the DSLR. The second time round I came away with an image I was happy-ish with but I knew from that point what I actually wanted was a picture of it, in the snow obviously in winter as the sun was setting. Winter 2010-2011 came and went and only having a bad December with the snow I never got to the location. I did contemplate going early spring after checking TPE (The Photographers Ephemeris) knowing that the sun set in the right place but never made it out. After that TPE looked to show that the sun wouldn’t quite set where it needed to as to give fantastic side lighting. So when the first snow of winter 2011-2012 fell in the Dark Peak I quickly made my way over to this area not wanting to wait yet another year for this image (bearing in mind it had been 2 years already).

It is quite a walk in, around a hour or so, even longer in the snow and puts most people off it would seem as it is not often photographed (all the better!) but upon arriving at the top after a lot of cursing and catching my breath I could see it was totally worth it. I did imagine a more snow covered scene the previous 2 years but I couldn’t have been happier on the day seeing the nice contrasts of the glowing warm rocks to the cool colours of the snow.