When deciding on a direction for assignment one, I chose firstly a location, the seaside. I wanted to convey something about the time of year, that is Christmas and New Year or Winter Solstice if you like which took me to the idea of beginnings and endings. I had the sense that the Sublime had a quality of the ineffable. I began thinking about how this time of year makes me feel. It’s a marker of time where we look backwards and look forwards and this took me to the idea of impermanence.
I lured my partner down to Frinton with the promise of a bag of chips at Walton-on-the-Naze. With my compact camera in my pocket, I wanted to get some ideas.
The most poignant image for me was the bench where someone had tied a bunch of flowers to it obviously as a memorial. I thought the image (albeit a quick snap in passing) had a beautiful and yet very sad feeling to it which evoked memories of a couple sitting viewing the sea, maybe holding hands. I was also inspired by the cliff erosion at Walton and considered that as something to explore, when the tide was out!
I’d also had the idea of shooting sunrises and sunsets using long exposures to create abstract bands of colour so over the Christmas period, armed with my new camera I made early morning trips to Frinton and Walton to experiment.
I became particularly interested in the cliff erosion at Walton. As you can see I had a couple of stunning mornings where the warm light reflected onto the crumbling cliffs. Further research revealed this area as a site of geological interest and a site for fossil hunting. This put me in a bit of a quandary. After a bit of thought, I decided I wanted to save Walton-on-the-Naze as a topic for assignment three: Spaces to Places.
I made my own bunch of flowers with the intention of setting up a shot similar to the one above and to use a broken down jetty (when the tide was completely out – I got there too late that day – traffic). Although there were other scenes to explore, I felt I needed to choose a more specific direction.
So in the end I went back to what was my original idea, of the sunrise/sunset abstracts as a way of expressing beginnings and endings, the two being opposites but also one and the same. I decided I wanted to capture these impermanent fragments of time.
I began by using an 85mm lens and aimed for a shutter speed of 25-30 secs, however realised foolishly that my smallest aperture was f16, so I had to switch back to a 35mm. The light and colour is surprisingly different depending on the weather. I wanted true colour so I’ve not used colour filters but realised I needed to use an ND filter especially when the weather was clear, even a good half hour before sunrise as it was simply too bright.
I made a lot of early morning trips and gained a large number of images. Each visit I improved my technique, and each visit revealed quite different images.
I’ve loved this experience, even though it was bl**dy freezing and it took me far longer than I anticipated, as each visit to the beach revealed something new and I found my images got better the more I practised which encouraged me to make more trips. It’s enabled me to get to know my new camera however and get practice using filters which I’m now quite keen on.
Landscape, Place and Environment 