Last year, I spent a morning at Stainforth Force on the River Ribble, hoping to get some decent shots of the salmon leaping the falls on their way to their spawning grounds.  My visit was not particularly successful since there were few fish performing and those that did, didn’t perform to order!  Now this is not unusual with wildlife but these fish are even more frustrating because they leap out of the water unannounced from the bottom of the waterfall which is in such turmoil that you haven’t a hope of seeing them coming.  The trick is to get set up with the tripod in such a position that you can get a reasonable focus on a section of the falls and then shoot as soon as anything makes an appearance. Anyway, last year, I wasn’t happy with any of the shots and I stuck them in the bin.

This year was a bit different.  I arrived at about 8am on a cloudy morning after a day or two of rain so the falls were at a good level.  I’d decided where to put the camera and I sat on a rock for 7 hours.  The results of that were quite interesting.  First, I couldn’t hear my camera shutter for the noise of the falls and there was a point when I ran out of camera battery and didn’t realise until I noticed my flash wasn’t firing.  Secondly, staring at a waterfall for such a long time made it quite difficult to maintain my concentration and, once or twice, a fish jumped clear out of the water in front of me and I didn’t react at all.  I had to shake myself and re-concentrate. (check out that one, scrabble players)  But, worst of all, when I finally tried to stand up, rigor mortis had set in and I had to stagger to safer ground to avoid falling into the river.  However, there were loads more fish this year and I did get some much better images. I was fascinated by the acrobatics of the salmon and a few trout as they hurled themselves up the waterfall.  Of course, many didn’t make it at first go and had to practice quite a lot.  One or two thought they would take the easy route at the left side of the falls and ended up landing on the rock with what seemed like a painful slap.  Nature is pretty amazing and this little bit of Yorkshire is definitely worth a visit around this time of year.  Take a camera and a tripod and don’t fall in the river…