Hills above Kendal, between the Lakes and the Dales

In honor of being in England (where I will not have access to this blog), I will post some images from a trip my wife and took to the Lake Country and Yorkshire Dales in 2005. They were taken with the Minolta A1, perhaps the worst digital camera I have ever used…it had a great lens: 28 to 140mm equivalent as I remember, but the sensor had very limited dynamic range compared to cameras I have owned since. I eventually bought a little 6mp Sony pocket camera and, when I saw the results it produce, stopped carrying the A1 altogether. Eventually there was a recall on the model when the sensors failed. By then my daughter was using the camera, and the sensor failed right after the Sony Minolta deal when service was in limbo. I never did get it fixed.

This is image, on the other hand, is one of my favorites from the camera and the trip. Our first night at a farm house B&B above Kendal at the edge of the Lake District, between the lakes and the dales, we took a walk in the B&B.

Minolta A1, at 70mm equivalent. F7.1 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.

In Lightroom I preprocessed all the images in this set (>200) as a batch, applying the Punch preset (added Clarity and Vibrance), and the Landscape sharpen preset. I then opened individual images for additional processing. On this one I applied some Recovery for the sky, a bit of Fill Light, and slid the blackpoint to the right to intensify all the colors.

From England 2005.