Kite Boarding, Personal, Photography, Surfing |

December 11, 2015

Into the light – A windy day at Llangennith, Gower Peninsula

The recent?days of grey did have the odd interruption of sunlight and it was?during one of these that I was at the Llangennith?end of Rhossili Bay. The wind was really blowing in from the north keeping the surf down and a bit messy. Not the best waves, but good enough for a bit of practise. A few kite boarders were present going up and down the shoreline. Unfortunately two finished just as I arrived, but another arrived with his dog and set off, luckily just as the light started to get interesting.

The lighting changed from bright, light cloud to intense, bright backlighting to the final blues and yellows of sunset all in an hour or two. It would have been easy to leave at the start with the bland cloud, but it always pays to stay and see what happens.

Langland Bay, Personal, Photography, Surfing |

November 27, 2015

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A Dark Grey Day at Langland Bay, Gower Peninsula

It has been really dark and grey recently, so sharp, detailed images are really hard to come by in natural lighting. There is virtually no natural colour as well, so I was thinking black and white images when I headed down to Langland Bay on a stormy day to see what the surfers were up to. Although there were some decent waves, the lighting didn’t allow any photos of impact. I decided to change tack and moved over to the side of the bay where the long boarders were gathered.

This allowed me a side on view of them and also reduced the number of surfers around in the water. This gave less distracting elements in the background. As the long boarders were not trying any fancy tricks and holding their position on the board in a fairly still manner, they looked better when I used a slower shutter speed to show motion blur in the water. There were lots of misses with this technique, but when it works, I really liked the results.

Events, Mountain Walking, Personal, Photography |

November 9, 2015

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Lagging Behind, Snowdon Race 2015

I’m really lagging behind on my posts this year. Things are?so busy most of the time and other deadlines get priority, but I hope to catch up with my recent images soon. I’ve started to document the Snowdon Race, which occurs every July.

There are two races; an international invitational race to the summit and the larger Snowdon Race to the summit and back from Llanberis. This has a few hundred entrants and incorporates entrants of all ages. One of the groups is 65 and over! The summit is still open to regular hill walkers so the entrants have to work their way around them. Even with this extra hazard, the winners can complete the race in about one hour and ten minutes.

Seeing people of all ages and abilities making their way to the summit is a humbling experience. I don’t think I could run to the summit and back in a month of Sunday’s.

Personal, Photography, Surfing |

January 30, 2015

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Fall Bay, Gower Peninsula

After a recent walk with friends that took us through Fall Bay, I decided to return to try and get some surfing shots, using the coastline as a backdrop. It was hard getting the surfer, waves and backdrop in the ideal composition. Most of my attempts of a surfer on a wave just didn’t seem to work as well as the image above. Red is always a great colour for catching the viewers eye, so when a surfer arrived with a red coloured board on one side, I couldn’t believe my luck. Of the few frames I managed to get, the one above appealed to me the most.

With the sun backlighting the spray of the waves as they approached the shore, it gave me the opportunity to isolate one wave that was forming out to sea by itself over a shelf of rock. Although it doesn’t look that large the wave was a good six to eight feet tall. Some thing to provide?a sense of scale in the image would be nice, but it was too dangerous for the surfers?to surf with the rock shelf as close to the surface as it is.

As the light began to fade, I attempted a few landscape images with the sun hiding behind the clouds and headland. The position of the white foam of the incoming tide proved important to the composition, so I took quite a few images to get the correct sense of motion and volume of white in the image. I still think of the images as a work in progress, so look out for more to come.

Nature, Personal, Photography, Travel |

July 30, 2014

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Skokholm Island, Pembrokeshire – my annual retreat

Skokholm Island is my ultimate playground; I get to indulge my love of the natural world – expressing myself through photography, video and sound. Being away on an island, isolated from the real world with limited communication links to the daily life and basic but comfortable accommodation, allows me to rest and recuperate with no particular focus or plan in mind.

I have been visiting the island since 2001, every year, except for when the island accommodation was shut, and I find that it still feeds my soul, even though it has become so familiar to me. Every year the same birds breed in roughly the same place, the rabbits are ever present, plus the carcasses of predated Manx Shearwaters litter the ground as usual but even with all this familiarity, it still draws me back.

This familiarity helps me with come up with ideas to try out at each visit and with the feeling that I can always visit again next year, there doesn’t seem any pressure to create a large body of work at each visit. I can adapt with the conditions, so with this year the winds being non existent, sound recording became my main focus. Late nights were spent trying to record the calls of the Manx Shearwater in surround sound, mornings were for a lie in and evenings were for photography. Not a bad life for a week.

Roll on next year.