I was glad Lloyd had chosen Land’s End. He’d made himself an appointment with the Armed Knight, which some of you know is one of the pair of very appealing sea stacks just offshore at the most southwesterly tip of the mainland. It seemed like a good plan to me. Usually I get sucked into the classic view, the one that includes the arch, the knight and the lighthouse in the distance - I’ve shot that plenty of times, and why wouldn’t any of us do that? It’s a fantastic sight and tailor made for landscape togs. But shooting the Armed Knight in isolation is something I’ve done less often, and pretty much always from the same rocky outcrop. Today’s outing, the first meeting with Lloyd since he was here twelve months earlier, was an opportunity to try another angle. The intended subject has always been worthy of its own place in the spotlight. We’ll return to that story soon.
Lloyd was sitting in his car, waiting for my arrival at the agreed time. I suspect he’d been doing a little bit of scouting around already, at least as far as the pay station for the car park at any rate. A few expletives later I promised to show him where to park for free next time. Eight pounds fifty indeed - they do like to empty your wallet here, and that’s even before you’ve hefted a load more cash to visit Shaun the Sheep World. Don’t ask. I’ve ranted enough times before here on the subject of the monstrosity that somehow got planning permission here at the back end of the 1970’s, and I’ll say no more. Rip off merchants. There must be at least three billion more aesthetically pleasing and sympathetic ways in which the space at the edge of the world might have been developed. My favoured option would have been a cluster of granite crags covered in grass, with a colourful dressing of sea thrift in May. Shaun the Sheep World my…… oops, there I go again.
While I was more than happy to join Lloyd in the quest for the definitive shot of the Armed Knight, I had a second image in mind while I was here. One I’m always half hoping for when I come to the Edge of Eternity, and with the weather having been quite tasty in recent days, perhaps that lighthouse might be engulfed in one enormous wave at some point. I’ve managed to get that shot before, but not in good light. I’d try again today, and to that end I’d dismantled the inside of the bag and reassembled the inserts in a pathetic attempt to fit two cameras, one of them mounted with the big telephoto lens. I even remembered to dial in the settings before setting off, remembering something I’d seen recently on YouTube that had never occurred to me. I hope I’m not too presumptuous in saying that these days I generally watch Messrs Danson, Heaton and Peter-Iversen for entertainment purposes rather than educational ones, but every so often a stray pearl of wisdom falls and lands in between my ears. Why had I never thought of putting the camera into auto ISO mode to keep the aperture and more importantly the shutter speed where I wanted them to be, as Nigel had done in County Kerry recently? Obvious really, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook the simple solutions you’d never thought of - and that new noise reduction feature is such a lifesaver when you’ve got more grain in your image than a couple of farms in Norfolk combined.
My plan was simple. I’d put the first camera on the tripod and wait for interesting stuff to happen, and every so often I’d grab the other, and point it at the distant lighthouse in burst mode. With a fast shutter speed the handheld approach should work just fine. It meant I’d be sifting through a lot of shots later, and doing the thing I fear most, culling the unwanted ones. None of us enjoy that surely? But if I managed to grab just a handful of usable frames, then that would be the payoff.
There were no huge waves that engulfed Longships Lighthouse this time, well not unless you include the one that smashed its way over the roof as I opened up the bag on first arrival. But as the light came and went and I settled into a rhythm, something else occurred to me. Depth, added by the presence of some substantial rollers halfway between me and the lighthouse was something I might not have spotted if the camera had been mounted on the tripod. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder was bringing the scene much closer and making it easier to understand. Another burst of light through the clouds; another burst of rapid fire on a high shutter speed. Depth, light and aspect ratio. I liked it in portrait mode, but if anything I liked it even more in sixteen by nine.
Five hundred and five raw files were quickly reduced to sixty-seven, of which only two made it into the operating theatre. On the first, the foreground wave curled handsomely across the water before the lighthouse, but the golden light that filtered across the sea and onto the side of the lighthouse and the sea in the second was what I’d been hoping for. I’ve shot the lighthouse on a number of occasions before, but this is the first time it’s appeared here as a subject in its own right. A huge wave smashing over it would really ramp up the stakes, but the great thing about not having captured that means I still have a reason to sit behind that outcrop, now and again poking my head over the parapet and firing away with abandon. Maybe it’ll happen this winter some time, but meanwhile, this one, taken at ISO 1250 makes me very happy and inspires me to come back for more. Which is always a good thing.
