Thanks.
..."a giant bonsai", never thought of it like that before but the description fits well :-)
The blue patch is the basin for a garden solar shower.

Colourful trains ! Good to get one on each platform like that

All the beer didn't seem to hinder you getting some good concert photos here. Full of light and energy as usual for you. Getting close up really makes the difference!

Nice shot of an impressive building !
The ensuthiasm for photography can wane sometimes, but it comes back again :-)

I like this one best, probably because it has more contrast.
-20°C is cold !!I I think we've only had about -10°C here so far this winter

The Frozen Moors

I've not managed much in the way of walking with a camera this week as it's still a bit too dark by the time I finish work and the weekend weather has been rubbish, but I did manage to briefly drag myself out onto the moors last Sunday having heard reports on social media of freezing fog over Roddlesworth way, which I felt warranted investigation.

It was an effort to drag myself out of a nice warm house into freezing temperatures though, and I ended leaving myself with just an hour of daylight to play with, which was unfortunate as the conditions were rather nice and I'd have liked to explore the part of the moors I ended up on a little longer.

The unpredictable wintry conditions ruled out the supremely weather unresistant X-T50 and I didn't feel like lugging the hefty GFX kit around on this particular trip, so I ended up with the Z8+24-70 f/2.8S swinging around my neck as I trudged as far as I could in the limited time available onto the moors from the Roddlesworth side, which is the opposite side to where I live and not my usual approach.

All images taken handheld and processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23.

Great Hill

This is a view looking towards Great Hill as I made my way onto the moors. I'm actually stood at the side of the A675 here. From what I consider to be my side of the moors, you've got to do a bit of walking in order to get your boots onto this peaty wilderness, but from here on the eastern approach, there's a road snaking its way across it. I would have liked to omit the bit of fence in the bottom left, but I'm as close to it as I can get here, leaning very lightly against a worryingly leaning wall where the road crosses a stream. I could easily clone it out, but that's cheating right?

Frosty Tops of the Tockholes Plantation

The path from the road follows the side of the stream towards its source on the lower reaches of Great Hill. It's a gradual climb up towards Great Hill, but the boggy excuse for a path made it hard going, even in these chilly conditions, the surface wasn't frozen in many places and I was treading carefully, having once met a man on Heapey Moor who was completely covered in mud up to his waist. Apparently he'd come across this part of the moors, following the path and suddenly fell through the peat into water up to his waist. That was on a nice spring day, with these conditions, I wasn't taking any chances. Anyway, this is a view looking back towards the road (which runs just along the bottom of those trees). It's a pity I hadn't brought a longer lens as I'd have liked to fill more of the frame vertically with those frosty trees. Mind you, in this weather I wouldn't have been particularly comfortable swapping lenses.

Piccadilly Farm

Piccadilly farm sits beside the A675, nestled between the Tockholes plantation and the ruins of Hollinshead Hall (home of the super creepy well house I've previously shared photos of). Taken with no passing cars on the road, this view has barely changed in more than a hundred years and has a timeless quality (if you ignore the power cables, road signage and double glazing on the farmhouse, all of which are largely hidden by the 2K downscale I've applied to this image).

Darwen Moor

I wider view from roughly the same spot, revealing more of the Tockholes plantation to the left and the bulk of Darwen moor looming to the rear. This shot. along with the previous one, make me wish I'd brought the GFX100S as that extra resolution really shines when making panos from a single shot. Still, I think the full res versions of these are about 25MP after cropping, which would still look good in a decent sized print.

A Frosty Fence

This is about as far as I got before turning back due to time constraints. I was hoping to reach the ruins of Pimm's farm (located beside the tree you can see in this picture), but time had run out. Also note how foggy Great Hill has become by this point, you can no longer see the summit, which was perfectly visible when I set off.

That's a cracking image.

What an interesting tree. I wish we'd had some conditions like that here. There's some quite obvious haloing around the tree, which is a minor distraction from an otherwise nice image.

A nice set.
The frost and misty backgrounds work well in these. Gives a sort of pastel colour effect.
Nice to see that depth effect; given by the darker high contrast foreground objects, like the fence in the last shot, and hills with less and less contrast and details as you look further and further back into the image. The hills sort of just blend into the sky.

Thanks
This was unfortunately just a quick grab shot with my phone yesterday. It breaks down when you zoom in :-(
I should have got my camera out of the bag, but was too too busy at the time.
It's all melted away now, so I'll have to wait until next time for a better shot

I like the light in these, the warm colours are great.

I note that the unwarranted censorship of ducks has been removed from the rules of this thread, opening up a broad range of exciting new photographic possibilities for future posts. Well, photos of ducks at least.

An impressive looking building. Hopefully you'll get your mojo back soon.

Fascinating patterns. Glad it never gets that cold here in the North of England. I think the coldest I've measured so far this winter is -5C.

I can heartily recommend the Z8 over the Z7 it's a much nicer camera to use and I haven't noticed any drop in IQ despite the slight drop in DR it purportedly suffers. I've still got my Z7 as a backup body, because it wasn't worth the laughable trade in I was offered and I didn't fancy the risks of a private sale, but it hasn't been out of my camera cabinet since the Z8 arrived almost a whole year ago.

Ah, what a shame. The website wasn't displaying EXIF info a moment ago (it seems to come and go from time to time along with the pop up viewer window vs opening images in another tab), so I wouldn't have guessed it was a phone shot, although I noticed that at full res it does look a bit oversharpened too, which makes sense now you mention it, pretty impressive nonetheless.

Thanks. When I worked on recreational flight sims back in the mid 90's, as we couldn't draw very many polygons with our (at the time, class leading) software renderer, we used to gradually fade the vertices of the polygons towards a fog colour as they were drawn further from the camera position, a technique we called "depth fade", a name I still use in my head for the effect you describe here. It was much the same effect and something games still do today, although they can draw a lot further into the distance than we could back then (or seemingly the moors could on the day I took these).

Fascinating locale and superb atmosphere.
Thank you for your dedication to the craft of photography. You are blessed by timeless scenery.