Friday 5 June 2026 – One of my favourite sayings in life is a quote from Louis Pasteur, which can roughly be translated (he was foreign, you know) as “chance favours the prepared mind”. In other words, you can sometimes improve your own luck by having the future possibilities at the back of your mind.

The following is a story about how this mindset enabled a photographic plan to come together. To quote The A Team‘s Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together”. Photographically speaking, this happens to me quite rarely; normally a plan leads to a bitterly disappointing brush with reality. One exception was a visit to the lovely old city of Ghent in Belgium, where I planned ahead and got some very gratifying photographs around the canals by getting up ridiculously early one morning when the weather forecast was favourable for the reflections which I so love in a photo. That was the last occasion a plan came together – and it was 15 years ago. A few days up in the northern reaches of England looked like it might present another opportunity.

Ever since the fortieth anniversary of our graduation from university, a group of my now-graduate friends has met every year, each year choosing a different place to explore around a dinner. In 2026, the chosen site was the Settle-Carlisle Railway. Unlike one of our previous venues, the Gloucester-Warwickshire Railway, this is not a heritage railway, although it does have some historical interest, having been rescued from oblivion several times. It runs normal trains on normal tracks. Apart from the usual pleasant chance to catch up with my university friends, what really piqued my interest about this rail journey was that the line goes across one of the great pieces of building work in the country – the Ribblehead Viaduct. I had long wanted the chance to see and photograph this impressive construction, and particularly to get some aerial shots of it with my drone, that area being not in any way restricted for flying. Perfection would be to get a shot of a steam train on the viaduct, but I would, I decided, be content with any old train if that were possible.

The itinerary for our day out involved taking the train from Settle to the Ribblehead Station, getting off there, admiring the viaduct and then carrying on to Carlisle for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure that this would give me enough time to set the drone up and get the shots I wanted, so I hatched a complementary plan which said I would get up early and drive out to the viaduct, getting the shots I wanted and joining the rest of the group as they were shooting through.

The bugger factor was the weather. The forecast weather on the Monday evening before our trip was dreadful and for the trip itself not encouraging.

The actual weather we had on the evening before was not too bad, so I thought I might get away with my early morning plan.

Wrongly, as it turned out.

I drove through some drizzle, low cloud and actual heavy rain, trying to think positive thoughts, but when I arrived at Ribblehead, this is as much of the viaduct as I could see,

and what I could see was through fairly persistent drizzle. Not a chance of flying in those conditions, then. Sighing, I returned to the hotel, the only consolation being that at least I arrived back in time to get some breakfast before our trip to Carlisle.

As we departed the hotel to catch the Carlisle train, laden with camera and tripod for an attempt at a group photo at Ribblehead, I thought I might as well take the drone along, just in case – perhaps I might get a quick chance at a flight when we arrived at Ribblehead.

Hah!

This was the view walking from the station towards the viaduct. There is a viaduct in this picture, I promise you.

Again, not a candidate environment for aerial photography. Or any photography, really, though I did try for a few shots of the viaduct as we walked to it.

I had brought my Sony RX100 model vii with me as a convenient camera for catching snapshots around Carlisle, and, of course, had the phone, too.  So I thought I’d do some photographic nerdery and take comparative shots of the same scene with each camera.

The only processing I’ve done is to correct the keystoning, i.e. make the verticals vertical, and crop the Sony images to be the same shape as from the phone.  The middle one is how the shot came out of the Sony (I took care not to overexpose it), and I have tweaked its light levels for the one on the right to make it comparable with the phone results. It shows what an impressive job your mobile phone cameras can do these days, doesn’t it? Of course the Sony can match it, but the phone scores heavily for convenience – no processing necessary to get a decent image.

Actually, my preferred processing of the Sony image for the shot would be this

which shows the benefits of taking a RAW image to get maximum quality. The downside is that every photo needs to be processed.

We stumbled damply back to Ribblehead station and took the next Carlisle train, and there was something of an improvement in the weather as we bowled along through the very lovely North Yorkshire countryside,

and it was seeing this that made me change my plans for the rest of the day. I decided that it might be worth taking an early train back from Carlisle to see how the weather was back at Ribblehead; current plans have me visiting Carlisle again next year. So that’s what I did. And I’m glad I did, because the conditions back at Ribblehead had somewhat improved.

This was the view from the station.

(noting, however, that conditions weren’t perfect).

I walked up the road to recreate the scene which had been so dismal that morning, and the difference was striking.

Although the same scene one minute later had changed somewhat.

I was therefore faced with a brisk wind which was whipping the conditions through quite quickly, but it was clear that it would be worth having a go with the drone – which my prepared mind had ensured that I had with me, allowing chance to favour me.

It was quite tricky trying to work whether the weather was going to traduce me, so I hastened to a point quite near the viaduct and whizzed up the drone to scope out what the scene would look like.  At that point I heard a lovely sound – the two notes of a train horn!

I quickly whizzed the drone over to its maximum 500m distance and stationed it where I could get a clear view of the viaduct,

and the train obligingly came through while there was still some life left in the drone’s battery.

Having scored that small victory, I set about trying to take some other shots I had visualised. The changeable weather made things a bit tricky, and it was breezy with some very significant gusts. I had learned my lesson some years ago when I very nearly lost a drone into a strong tailwind, so I made sure that I was stationed downwind of the drone at all times and went to the middle of the viaduct to set up some photos, the nicest of which I think is this,

and to take some more video.

My original thought was to take footage as I reversed the drone through an arch. The first time I tried this, the drone had just got backwards through the arch before a gust of wind suddenly smacked it forwards. I’m glad I’d centred the drone on the arch, otherwise the wind might have smashed it into the brickwork. I did get arch footage in the end, but it was ruined by a berk walking into my shot as the drone flew back through the arch.  Since he was there doing his own drone work, this counts as unforgiveable, but because I was focussed on watching the drone, I didn’t realise what he’d done until I reviewed the footage later. So I have to content myself with the plan B footage I also took, which I quite like.

All in all, I’m very happy to have got the shots, although I’m disappointed that my “reverse through the arches” didn’t come out as I would like. I’m really impressed that a 250g drone (a DJI Mini 3 Pro)  could (by and large) still operate in strong gusty winds and still give smooth footage. It was amazing to watch it thrashing about in the breeze whilst it delivered rock steady video.

What really pleased me was my decision to take the drone with me even though the weather prospects were poor. Chance does indeed favour the prepared mind; I doubt I’ll ever get back to Ribblehead and I’m content to have made the best of the day as it offered itself.