It was Saturday evening as Steve and I stood on top of the dunes, surveying the scene in front of us and watching the light begin to soften and intensify with the arrival of the golden hour. The beach was still busy on this wonderfully warm September weekend, when I’d arrived armed with flip flops instead of wellies to tackle the water. I'm programmed to stand in six inches of water every time I come here you see. And while Steve only had this one chance to capture the light on the dunes and prepare for a battle with unwanted beach tents in the editing suite later, I was content to sit and watch the world go by, and chat about the differences between his state of the art mirrorless set up and my clunky old collection of rag tag lenses, one of which was making its debut appearance here at Holywell Bay after a long journey west from Pakistan. We talked about Flickr and our virtual friends. Of course we talked about you. We really liked your shot of [insert subject and location here], although we thought your picture of [insert subject and location here] might have looked slightly better with a sixteen by nine crop. Just saying.
And then we strolled down from our lofty position, my trusty summer boat shoes filling with increasing amounts of sand at every step, and made our way onto the beach, passing the tents that had made Steve’s composition that bit more challenging than he might have liked, and heading for the flat wet expanse left by the retreating tide. But if we thought it would be plain sailing from here, we were sadly mistaken. The September heatwave had filled the beach with visitors, and even at the sunset hour plenty of them were still in and around the sea. Rather more annoyingly, barely a minute passed without one of them marching through the sand pool I’d had my eye on for a reflection shot. Salivating dogs and splashing infants invading the space where I planned to set up my tripod and take the first picture with the new addition to the bag - my knee saving budget plan for taking wide angle shots on the camera with the articulating screen. Try and do this on the full frame with the old and crotchety but far more costly lens that refuses to auto focus, and I’d have to practically lie down in the water.
Eventually, the torrent of incomers having vacated the water, I was ready to shoot. It’s just a shame the lens wasn’t. Everything looked normal, the new acquisition focused eagerly as I looked down at the flipped out screen from above, but when I pressed the shutter, instead of being rewarded with a copy of the scene in front of me, an error message appeared, inviting me to clean the contacts. Standing here on a beach, surrounded by life, sand and seagulls, no amount of tinkering and wiping was going to fix the problem. And so I resorted to the other lens, the 24-70 that accompanies me everywhere, regardless of whatever else goes in the bag for each outing. Bang went the plan for big foregrounds full of texture and water, and along came its emergency replacement - although quite what that might be, I hadn’t decided just yet. Maybe I’d leave one or two of the people who littered each frame and airbrush the rest away. Meanwhile, the sky continued to fill with textures and warm colours in the minutes before sunset.
We moved closer to the sea, setting up our tripods and stoically ignoring the endless distractions around us, one of us occasionally calling across the twelve yard gap to see how the other was getting on. The foreground was rather messier than I’m used to here, not only because of the mass of humanity, but also the absence of a curving river across the sand that so often fills the frame and banishes all distractions at low tide. Apart from slowing down the water right in front of me, I was watching both clouds and light in a composition that didn’t quite match some of the more dynamic ones I’ve found here before now. I was happy enough though. Usually by early September at this time of day I’m in a coat, jeans and welly boots here, but today it was shorts, tee shirt and the aforementioned flip flops on this balmy evening.
And then something interesting happened as wave after wave of gulls flew overhead from the cliffs behind us to land on the shore or in the sea, filling the air with activity. Much like our visit to Godrevy on Monday, we were dealing with interlopers, but this lot were feathered, noisy and in far greater numbers. I abandoned the filters and raised the ISO well into four figures, silently thanking a certain editing suite for the recent introduction of a new and much improved noise reduction feature. Despite the complete failure of Plan A, something had worked.
It was time to say farewell - for now at least. Steve had a long journey home the following day, and I was about to take part in a reunion of the three happy snappers with Dave and Lee the next morning. And there was the matter of an errant lens to attend to. More of that in the next episode.
