Lake District Mountain Landscape

The latest arrival from prolific award-winning mountain film-maker and photographer Alastair Lee, is a coffee table-sized book of Lake District photography, 'Lake District Mountain Landscape'.


Whereas most of Al's previous photographic volumes have been modest paperbacks, the new one is a proper 13"x10" hardback beastie and has taken him more than five years to put together.

The wider format at last does justice to Lee's photography, giving the pictures room to spread out and make themselves comfortable on the page. And it really is quite lovely. The book is unequivocally about mountains. There are very few Lakeside vistas, mostly these are summit shots of jagged rocks tearing through snow, stunning skyscapes wrapped across high peaks and views from mountains not merely of them.


The book's divided into four sections: New Perspectives, which seeks to steal the Lakes back from the picture postcard cliches; Hidden Landscape, an attempt to depict the deeper  story of man's subtle historical impact on the landscape; Mountain Craft, images of sheer crags and climbers, often dwarfed by the scale of the cliffs they cling to; and lastly, Alpine Window, images of the Lakes in winter under snow and ice.

There are so many stunning images here that it's hard to pick individual shots out, each page turned seems to trigger a grin - sometimes its born of recognition and triggered memories, Helvellyn's plateau edge in winter conditions or humped vistas of the Langdale Pikes. Others are just about virtual eaves-dropping on someone else's magical summit day or wild camp dawn, a sort of photographic voyeurism, a sharing of something special.

It really is a fantastic book and Alastair's thoughtful prose, pulls you even deeper into it, making you think about the landscape and the individual images. We could blather on, but really, if you love being in the mountains, then all you really need to know, is that you'll almost certainly love this book.

Stunning stuff. If you want to see  more, pop over to www.posingproductions.com and browse through some sample pages. 'Lake District Mountain Landscape' retails for £25 and is published by Frances Lincoln.