Trip to Top Withens

I'm very pleased that we managed the trip without mishaps. It pays to think big sometimes.

I feared that:

• it might rain
• it might be too windy for the tent
• we might get cold
• we might forget a vital piece of equipment
• the pictures might not come out properly
• Rick might leave us up there and drive off
• we might get trampled by elephants

Since none of this happened, I call it a good day.


Some useful things I have learned:

• You can make a perfectly good safelight by putting a bright LED torch into a safelight casing, if you haven't got mains electricity
• If you have several sheets of rectangular paper rolled up in a tube, you can tell which ones you have used by rolling them to be narrower than the unused ones, and taping them up so they fall into the centre of the tube
• You can learn from experience (like basing a new exposure on what worked the day before) even if you don't work things out very precisely. And sometimes precision is not the most important thing
• You can make small improvements by keeping your nerve (in my case, by adding still more plates to increase the focal length of the lens and make the pictures sharper).

Has anyone else learned useful things?