An early start
I’d like to say that the alarm woke me up at 03:00, but I was already awake and getting dressed. This appears to be the way my head works when I’ve planed a trip, I run through all the timings on my head a few times and somehow my subconscious brain decides that sleep will just get in the way and wakes me earlier.
I was on the road by 03:25 and on my way up to Holy Island on the northumberland coast. I was initially planning on a shorter trip back to St Marys Lighthouse, but thought I would roll the dice and hope that the predicted decent sunrise would be worth the trip.
A year or so ago I stumbled across a Northumberland photographer by the name of Jim Scott who won an award a couple of years ago for an amazing dawn shot of Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island from the shoreline of a small cove where boats lie beached on their side awaiting the incoming tide. It’s a beautiful image and one that I have been inspired by ever since. You can see his work on his website. He is one of a number of photographers who have inspired me to go out and practice and I plan a whole other blog on how others works can inspire and influence.
So my plans changed as the tides were right, I could cross the causeway in time for sunrise in the same location and see whether I could get a similar composition.
My motivation was not to copy Jims image, but to try and capture my own version.
This was not the first time I had been up this way and I have no doubt I will be back again soon, however on this occasions as I was driving up I began to see the telltale signs of dawn and could already see that it was not going to live up to my expectations. I had been hoping for one of those brilliant sky filling colour shows, where yellows and pinks fill the whole sky and bathe the landscape like honey.
One of my favorite authors is the great late Terry Pratchett - this passage from “the light fantastic” often springs to mind when the sun is rising:
“When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup. It paused to fill up valleys. It piled up against mountain ranges. When it reached Cori Celesti, the ten mile spire of gray stone and green ice that marked the hub of the Disc and was the home of its gods, it built up in heaps until it finally crashed in great lazy tsunami as silent as velvet, across the dark landscape beyond.”
Sometimes when I’m waiting for the light to come it feels that way.
This particular morning there were muted colours mainly on the horizon and only maybe 15 degrees above it. Never the less I carried on and thought to make the most of it as if there was one main lesson I have learned by now - You have to be there to take an image and you NEVER know what a dawn may bring, you may have written the whole thing off and then BAM for 5 minutes you have amazing mackerel skies and a kaleidoscope of pinks and purples.
Once I had arrived and geared up I made my way to the beach where to my delight the tide was suitably out and there was a lovely exposed mudflat. Unfortunately it’s obviously not the season for boats to be moored in the harbour as it was demonstrably empty of boats! Never the less I began to look for decent images of the castle with the sun rising behind.
Still pre dawn at a wide 28mm the mudflats were reflecting the sky nicely here and the short focal length shows the castle as a small silhouette on the horizon - I particularly like the mudflat textures in this one.
This was exactly the darkened silhouette that I was going for and that I am discovering I favour in a lot of my sunrise images.
A little up the beach were a number of small boats pulled up along with some large boat sheds that the Island is quite famous for.
I also looked to try and find a contrasty black and white of the same boat which I am really happy with.
I particularly like the textures on the boat bottom..
By now the sun was above the horizon an peaking from behind the castle:
This has me slowing walking the length of the beach to try and keep the sun behind the castle.
This is such a great spot because there are so many different boats moored or stored that can be used as focal points - this next one was a particular favourite again for the textures on the hull.
Continuing the boat theme there was a small dinghy just at the waters edge that I thought lined up brilliantly with the castle, again maintaining the whole silhouette theme that I am increasingly fond of.
By now the sun was a little higher and too bright for good castle shots, so I had a little look around. nearby there is a small hill fort used to defend there harbour from centuries ago. Little more than ruins it provides an interesting foreground frame for the single boat in the harbour in an image that highlights the pastels that were coming out now the sun was little higher.
By now I was done, knackered and heading back to the car when I was distracted by this wonderful upturned boated turned shed, that the island is famous for. The worn and battered state of the exterior was bathed in that warm honey like light and I had to grab a few more snaps - this one in particular was worth the whole trip on its own!
This black and white version shows more of the wear that this structure has been subjected to which provides wonderful textures.
These are just a selection of what turned out to be a fruitful drive up the coast, despite the early rise. I’ll no doubt be up even earlier in the coming months as the nights grow shorter.
on the way back I popped into the sea village of Seahouses, another famous location on the Northumberland coast. There were a range of different vessels in the harbour, the light was a little more diffuse and I did end up with one snap that I was particularly happy with - a very James Popsys styled image of the harbour which I will end this post on!
