A Dreamy Glow
Some of you are very kind, reading the lengthy diversions I accompany my images with, much of it totally irrelevant to the shot itself. I'm not really sure I can drag another story out of Saturday evening to be honest. But you know I'm ready to give it a go. As I walked at an almost Olympian pace to the spot I'd planned to spend the last hours of daylight on, I watched the light spreading over St Ives on the other side of the bay, hanging dreamily over the distant town and illuminating it in a haze of yellow light. I'd tried a rarely used shortcut to get here, which proved a mistake and cost me the minutes that made me know I was going to miss the moment. Why on earth I have these occasional aberrations of the mental satnav I really can't explain - without exception they always fail. As I set up my tripod the sun appeared from behind the clouds which until that moment had brought a lovely diffused sky over to the west and I cursed myself for missing the moment.
I moved my tripod to a spot further along the cliff, exchanging a few words with a chap who'd come to stand on the clifftop and watch the sky change. "Looking promising!" he suggested as he watched me straighten my tripod, possibly looking a bit nonplussed as this grumpy old man complained he'd missed the light he'd been watching as he strode the mile or so along the path from the car park.
Of course I was wrong to grumble. I should have known that a healthy mixture of rain and sun would bring an evening sky like this. I zoomed in on the lighthouse alone and ignored the setting sun, which would have only resulted in a whole heap of lens flare on the left hand side of the image. After all I'm not sure that a collection of red and green blotches is what photographers mean when they refer to the concept of balance in an image. I looked at the 3 inch screen before me and smiled.
And so for a few minutes the sun lit the side of Godrevy lighthouse as fiercely as I've ever seen it. As my unknowing guru Mr Nigel Danson so often likes to say, "It doesn't get any better than this."
A Dreamy Glow
Some of you are very kind, reading the lengthy diversions I accompany my images with, much of it totally irrelevant to the shot itself. I'm not really sure I can drag another story out of Saturday evening to be honest. But you know I'm ready to give it a go. As I walked at an almost Olympian pace to the spot I'd planned to spend the last hours of daylight on, I watched the light spreading over St Ives on the other side of the bay, hanging dreamily over the distant town and illuminating it in a haze of yellow light. I'd tried a rarely used shortcut to get here, which proved a mistake and cost me the minutes that made me know I was going to miss the moment. Why on earth I have these occasional aberrations of the mental satnav I really can't explain - without exception they always fail. As I set up my tripod the sun appeared from behind the clouds which until that moment had brought a lovely diffused sky over to the west and I cursed myself for missing the moment.
I moved my tripod to a spot further along the cliff, exchanging a few words with a chap who'd come to stand on the clifftop and watch the sky change. "Looking promising!" he suggested as he watched me straighten my tripod, possibly looking a bit nonplussed as this grumpy old man complained he'd missed the light he'd been watching as he strode the mile or so along the path from the car park.
Of course I was wrong to grumble. I should have known that a healthy mixture of rain and sun would bring an evening sky like this. I zoomed in on the lighthouse alone and ignored the setting sun, which would have only resulted in a whole heap of lens flare on the left hand side of the image. After all I'm not sure that a collection of red and green blotches is what photographers mean when they refer to the concept of balance in an image. I looked at the 3 inch screen before me and smiled.
And so for a few minutes the sun lit the side of Godrevy lighthouse as fiercely as I've ever seen it. As my unknowing guru Mr Nigel Danson so often likes to say, "It doesn't get any better than this."