Visitors
If you’re reading this at home in the northern half of England or Wales or Scotland, the chances are you’re quite used to it. I’ll bet you’re forever bumping into the likes of Danson and Heaton gadding about on the fells, setting up their tripods in the middle of your compositions and doing a piece to their second camera as you wait for a cloud inversion at Loughrigg or for a rainbow to appear over Assynt. You probably sigh inwardly as you arrive at the summit of Great Gable or Pen y Ghent, only to find Popsys babbling on about why he hates tripods into a camera mounted on a tripod, or to stumble over Turner as he gushes excitedly about how “mint” the view is from here before tucking into the latest protein bar he's discovered at his local Aldi. At some point you’ll probably hear the name “Squarespace” being sung loudly as we get to the bit of the video where we check our Flickr feeds to see whether anyone has noticed our latest post yet. Statistically, the chances are roughly 50:50 that you’ll be a YouTube megastar yourself within twenty years. We’re the new Elvis impersonators you know. Probably.
I’d always found it strange that nobody had done this anywhere around my neck of the woods. Admittedly Nigel Danson had suddenly popped up in Cornwall a couple of times and then disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived. I’d once missed him by a single day at Godrevy as I later discovered. A few years ago, in a burst of enthusiasm, Lee suggested that we set up our own YouTube channel. But I pointed out that we all have faces best suited to radio and voices best suited to a vow of silence. Fortunately, he soon abandoned the idea. It involves enough effort just taking the photos, no matter exposing our ignorance to a discerning audience as we blunder through our flaw strewn workflows before standing on top of each other to take exactly the same shot. And while Nigel sits at a pristine desk before a state of the art screen to present his editing process, I’m currently surrounded by all of the soft furnishings from the van that have been brought indoors for the winter, with a very substandard canvas of Kirkjufell half poking out from behind the matresses that are propped up against the wall where it hangs. So while the notion of attempting to become the Cornish Nigel Danson seemed like a worthwhile pursuit for as long as nearly twenty-five seconds, I’m glad the idea was buried before anyone took it further.
More recently I was starting to feel that the fact we were being almost completely ignored was actually a rather good thing. Did we really want people with almost half a million followers inspiring a glut of new arrivals to appear in the places where we seek those quiet moments alone? Would the places that we think of as our own seem cheapened when they appeared on screen? The old sense of entitlement beats strongly in this Westcountry heart you see. I’m really not that good at sharing. I’m quite happy to go and take pictures in other peoples’ back yards after being inspired to do so by the same YouTube presenters of course, but when the boot’s on the other foot, how would I really feel about it?
And then, while I was away in Lanzarote, I noticed posts from Nigel Danson and Mads Peter Iversen showing pictures of Portreath, just five miles from where I live, waxing excitedly about a week they’d just spent in Cornwall with the tripod-phobic James Popsys. How had that happened? Later, I was watching videos of them in several of my favourite locations. Land’s End, Botallack and Godrevy all appeared on the screen in front of me. At Kynance Cove, Mads posed himself on exactly the same ridge where I’d persuaded Ali to stand enigmatically last January, saying he hadn’t seen the composition at all during his research. How rude! And I paid handsomely for his online Photoshop course (which I hasten to add has been worth every penny). How did I feel watching all of this? Well about the same as I did in the summer of 1982 when my former best friend started going out with the girl I’d had a terrible crush on for about three years but was too shy to do anything about it. Ok, slight exaggeration but you get the picture. I’m over it now.
What I did find interesting was whether their fresh eyes would pick out things that I’d previously missed in places I go back to at regular intervals. At Kynance they shot the stacks from the north side rather than the clifftops to the east where I always go, although I really wasn’t that keen on the results. At Land’s End Nigel took a photo of the Enys Dodnan Arch from the west, looking back to the place where I always set up for a sunset and catching some beautiful soft light in the process. Here at Botallack, Mads had gone walkabout among the ruins of the mine, taking shots of the kind that I did on my first visits here as a tog eight years earlier but have never bothered with since. I wasn’t feeling wildly excited about any of those shots, but it did at least remind me that there are other options there besides the obvious subject. And as for that subject, well here it is, taken last November when Lloyd was paying a visit to Cornwall. In fact this is where we first met him. Ironically, the shots I most liked from the visit of the three YouTubers were the “obvious” ones they’d taken of the Crown Houses, experimenting with different shutter speeds as low to the water as one dares to in this potentially perilous corner of the county. Maybe that’s why so many of us take shots of the same subjects in places like this despite the myriad of possibilities within easy walking distance. At least they didn’t find Kenidjack Castle. Otherwise they’d have been all over my own private headland looking south – the one that featured in my last post. Oh hang it, there goes the self entitlement buzzer again.
Well that’s it, the final post of 2022 from me, albeit with an image from 2021. It’s been a strange year in many ways, especially in the grand scheme of things. But personally, it’s been a very good twelve months, my first full year of being a man of leisure. The year I became a grandfather. A year I’ll look back on and remember for some wonderful adventures and a glut of photos that still remain to be edited and shared in these pages. Surely you didn’t think I’d finished the Iceland set yet did you? I'm barely a quarter of a way through them in fact. What 2023 brings remains to be seen. Maybe that trip to the northwest of Scotland at last. Who knows? Nigel’s invited me to Antarctica. Only sixteen thousand six hundred and fifty dollars and I’m not sure that includes flights to South America from Europe either. I might need to sell so many body parts as to bring my five a side football career to a grinding halt, and some of my team mates might think that to be a good thing, but just think of the pictures I could get! I hope you’ve got plans of your own, and I hope you get to fulfil them. May your SD cards be filled with magic and your vistas be bathed in stunning light. I’ll wish you a happy new year and see you again in 2023.
The shot that Mads so rudely ignored: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/51840094903/in/datepo...
Visitors
If you’re reading this at home in the northern half of England or Wales or Scotland, the chances are you’re quite used to it. I’ll bet you’re forever bumping into the likes of Danson and Heaton gadding about on the fells, setting up their tripods in the middle of your compositions and doing a piece to their second camera as you wait for a cloud inversion at Loughrigg or for a rainbow to appear over Assynt. You probably sigh inwardly as you arrive at the summit of Great Gable or Pen y Ghent, only to find Popsys babbling on about why he hates tripods into a camera mounted on a tripod, or to stumble over Turner as he gushes excitedly about how “mint” the view is from here before tucking into the latest protein bar he's discovered at his local Aldi. At some point you’ll probably hear the name “Squarespace” being sung loudly as we get to the bit of the video where we check our Flickr feeds to see whether anyone has noticed our latest post yet. Statistically, the chances are roughly 50:50 that you’ll be a YouTube megastar yourself within twenty years. We’re the new Elvis impersonators you know. Probably.
I’d always found it strange that nobody had done this anywhere around my neck of the woods. Admittedly Nigel Danson had suddenly popped up in Cornwall a couple of times and then disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived. I’d once missed him by a single day at Godrevy as I later discovered. A few years ago, in a burst of enthusiasm, Lee suggested that we set up our own YouTube channel. But I pointed out that we all have faces best suited to radio and voices best suited to a vow of silence. Fortunately, he soon abandoned the idea. It involves enough effort just taking the photos, no matter exposing our ignorance to a discerning audience as we blunder through our flaw strewn workflows before standing on top of each other to take exactly the same shot. And while Nigel sits at a pristine desk before a state of the art screen to present his editing process, I’m currently surrounded by all of the soft furnishings from the van that have been brought indoors for the winter, with a very substandard canvas of Kirkjufell half poking out from behind the matresses that are propped up against the wall where it hangs. So while the notion of attempting to become the Cornish Nigel Danson seemed like a worthwhile pursuit for as long as nearly twenty-five seconds, I’m glad the idea was buried before anyone took it further.
More recently I was starting to feel that the fact we were being almost completely ignored was actually a rather good thing. Did we really want people with almost half a million followers inspiring a glut of new arrivals to appear in the places where we seek those quiet moments alone? Would the places that we think of as our own seem cheapened when they appeared on screen? The old sense of entitlement beats strongly in this Westcountry heart you see. I’m really not that good at sharing. I’m quite happy to go and take pictures in other peoples’ back yards after being inspired to do so by the same YouTube presenters of course, but when the boot’s on the other foot, how would I really feel about it?
And then, while I was away in Lanzarote, I noticed posts from Nigel Danson and Mads Peter Iversen showing pictures of Portreath, just five miles from where I live, waxing excitedly about a week they’d just spent in Cornwall with the tripod-phobic James Popsys. How had that happened? Later, I was watching videos of them in several of my favourite locations. Land’s End, Botallack and Godrevy all appeared on the screen in front of me. At Kynance Cove, Mads posed himself on exactly the same ridge where I’d persuaded Ali to stand enigmatically last January, saying he hadn’t seen the composition at all during his research. How rude! And I paid handsomely for his online Photoshop course (which I hasten to add has been worth every penny). How did I feel watching all of this? Well about the same as I did in the summer of 1982 when my former best friend started going out with the girl I’d had a terrible crush on for about three years but was too shy to do anything about it. Ok, slight exaggeration but you get the picture. I’m over it now.
What I did find interesting was whether their fresh eyes would pick out things that I’d previously missed in places I go back to at regular intervals. At Kynance they shot the stacks from the north side rather than the clifftops to the east where I always go, although I really wasn’t that keen on the results. At Land’s End Nigel took a photo of the Enys Dodnan Arch from the west, looking back to the place where I always set up for a sunset and catching some beautiful soft light in the process. Here at Botallack, Mads had gone walkabout among the ruins of the mine, taking shots of the kind that I did on my first visits here as a tog eight years earlier but have never bothered with since. I wasn’t feeling wildly excited about any of those shots, but it did at least remind me that there are other options there besides the obvious subject. And as for that subject, well here it is, taken last November when Lloyd was paying a visit to Cornwall. In fact this is where we first met him. Ironically, the shots I most liked from the visit of the three YouTubers were the “obvious” ones they’d taken of the Crown Houses, experimenting with different shutter speeds as low to the water as one dares to in this potentially perilous corner of the county. Maybe that’s why so many of us take shots of the same subjects in places like this despite the myriad of possibilities within easy walking distance. At least they didn’t find Kenidjack Castle. Otherwise they’d have been all over my own private headland looking south – the one that featured in my last post. Oh hang it, there goes the self entitlement buzzer again.
Well that’s it, the final post of 2022 from me, albeit with an image from 2021. It’s been a strange year in many ways, especially in the grand scheme of things. But personally, it’s been a very good twelve months, my first full year of being a man of leisure. The year I became a grandfather. A year I’ll look back on and remember for some wonderful adventures and a glut of photos that still remain to be edited and shared in these pages. Surely you didn’t think I’d finished the Iceland set yet did you? I'm barely a quarter of a way through them in fact. What 2023 brings remains to be seen. Maybe that trip to the northwest of Scotland at last. Who knows? Nigel’s invited me to Antarctica. Only sixteen thousand six hundred and fifty dollars and I’m not sure that includes flights to South America from Europe either. I might need to sell so many body parts as to bring my five a side football career to a grinding halt, and some of my team mates might think that to be a good thing, but just think of the pictures I could get! I hope you’ve got plans of your own, and I hope you get to fulfil them. May your SD cards be filled with magic and your vistas be bathed in stunning light. I’ll wish you a happy new year and see you again in 2023.
The shot that Mads so rudely ignored: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/51840094903/in/datepo...