Following on from previous posts, about my first camping experience at Glastonbury and my proposed camping trip to the Monaco Grand Prix, I recently enjoyed a fantastic weekend camping trip to the Lake District.
I work next to Punk Publishing who produce books including the 'Cool Camping' series. So, not to spurn this opportunity for campsite research, I set about looking for prospective locations for a weekend away that me and a friend had planned. We eventually decided on Turner Hall Farm in Southwaite. It was an inspired choice as the surrounding area was stunning. Completely off the radar and totally uncommercialised it was a brilliant little site. The facilities were basic but totally adequate and the pitches (although not specific, you could pitch anywhere you liked) were awesome. Using three fields within the farm, the craggy landscape provided plenty of sheltered and interesting places to pitch.
With several Lakes a nice driving distance away and the area around the campsite amazingly beautiful, it really was a great place to visit. The walks were fantastic and the local pubs friendly and inviting. Managed to get some great photos, which leads me on to something I discovered in Photoshop...
Now I sort of knew that Photoshop was capable of some sort of 'photo-stitching' for panoramic style images but had never used it before. I took a series of about 6 pictures of the landscape around our campsite and wanted to 'stitch' them all together to make one long image. To my delight Photoshop has an excellent couple of tools for this. First roughly position the images on separate layers so they are in the right order and place. Then go to 'edit>auto-align layers'. This curves the images so that all the elements of the image line up. It's truly fantastic. But that's not it. Then go to 'edit>auto-blend layers' and it matches all the colours and hue's etc. You then have a seamless panoramic photograph which you only need crop to complete the process. It's genius and one tool I will be using a lot more in the future.
