Photography in the Lakes

Now I can't remember the exact date, but this is the tale of a day in the Lake District in August 1982.

This particular day started up at Penrith where we visited the castle. I was freelancing photos to magazines at the time.

This was before the days of expensive colour appearing in magazines and freelancing meant shooting black and white film then printing up 10x8 inch prints and sending them off in batches after very careful analysis of the type of shots magazines used - eg mainly portrait or landscape, with or without people, what was the main content topic etc. No good trying to be different and expecting editors to say "Blimey - why haven't we tried this before?!?"

Anyway the top photograph was published a few times, mainly in a magazine called Lakescene - What to do in Lakeland who published it twice with a couple of years in between. Wandering around the castle in the photo and very chuffed at being published in a magazine are Miss Franny and Gill, our daughter and my Mum and Dad.

From Penrith we drove to Eamont Bridge where there are a couple of large henge earthworks.

Then down the length of Ullswater, stopping wherever I saw a chance for a saleable photo.

We doubled back up to Keswick after Ullswater to have a look at Derwent Water, arriving at the same time as two coach-loads the vast majority of whom, to my relief, boarded a couple of waiting boats and got out of our way! Lakescene liked to show photos of people enjoying the Lakes in traditional ways which meant I had a better chance of a sale if they were dressed for hiking not riding round in luxury coaches!

Ah... that's better! This is the Friar's Crag walk. It gives some lovely views of the lake and was a favourite walk of poet, artist and social reformer, John Ruskin, to whom there is a chunk of Lakeland stone set upright and carved with a few details.

My photo of the memorial has been published a few times also - nothing remarkable about it other than it's relevance for any article about Ruskin or this bit of Cumbria!

From Keswick we set off towards home, but stopped for a short diversion to Elterwater, a peaceful somewhat quieter and less visited lake than some of the others so that I could take photos, not only of the lake, but of the waterfall that can be found a few minutes walk away.

This is Skelwith Force, the word "force" being the local term for a waterfall. It's not a huge drop but a fair amount of water pours over the edge and it's well worth a visit. The amount of water makes it very noisy and some people when they hear it on the approach assume it's going to be much bigger than it really is. Wear some good shoes, this isn't the place to go in flip-flops...

The day yielded a good crop of photos that got published at one time or another, though it took some of them several years to achieve it! Once I started working in Education it didn't leave me much time for blacking out the bathroom and getting the photo enlarger out so my freelancing came to a stop at that point. However a cheque for one photo came through the post one day in the 1990s - some ten years after I had sent it off to a magazine! I'd never even seen it published as payment always followed a couple of months after the publication!

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Publications

My thanks to the IET Lancashire and Cumbria Network.

Not only did they have the good taste to ask me if they could publish one of my photographs for their April newsletter, but they used it on the cover and also were good enough to send me two copies to keep in my collection of publications.

The first photograph I ever had published was a shot of the Rochdale canal, that I entered in a photographic competition in 1981 in the magazine Lancashire Magazine.

It won third prize and I then went on to win more prizes in future issues, including two first prizes.

This set me off working freelance to a number of magazines, both local and national until my first cover photograph came in 1982 in the Lakescene Magazine.

Again I had a number of successes with Lakescene, but now I had my eyes set on written work as well as photographs.

I had a number of illustrated letters published in The Field and This England. They were all about some of the curiosities to be found in the countryside - windmills, village pumps etc.

Once again though it was Lancashire Magazine that gave me a breakthrough by publishing a double page spread about the history of Blackpool Trams along with 7 photographs and then later giving me a running series along the lines of the illustrated letters, called John Burke's Curious Lancashire.

From then I went onto greater things. A series of photos of an orang utan yawning featured full page in She and was seen and then taken on by the American National Enquirer. By now I had made enough money to pay for my camera - a Canon AE1. Which gave me another idea and I sold a few photos to the Canon Camera Club for use in their member's newsletter!

By the mid 1980s it was a poor month if I didn't have at least one photograph or article published in a magazine somewhere. I had a number of successes with animal photographs used for caption competitions. Annabel was one womens' magazine that regularly published that sort of photograph. I bought a year-long pass to Blackpool Zoo and spent hours waiting for animals to yawn, as this made them look as though they were laughing or singing!

In 1986 I had three photographs in the 1986 Blackpool Gazette calendar, including the front cover. It is the only photo I have showing the inflatable King Kong that was tied to the front of the Tower in 1985!

Then work began to take more of my time up, and I let the photographs slide a bit until the Internet made me sit up and take notice around 1994. Many of the articles I had written became part of my website.

Have a look. You'll find all the curiosity articles and the history of Blackpool Trams and countless others. Nowadays the web site only gets updated very rarely and my writing tends to be limited to this blog or for work-related publication. Many photographs are available large size from Flickr.

But there's a novel in the drawer, waiting for me to have a bit of time to spruce it up. Who knows? I may publish the first couple of chapters on a blog and then invite you to buy the rest!