I’m often reminded how lucky I am to call this place home. Over the last ten years it’s this passion for photographing the land and sea around here that’s really fired my enthusiasm for the corner of the land I’ve spent almost all of my life in. And when I think about it, it strikes me that there are a number of Cornwalls. You’ll probably recognise a few of them yourselves, from the foodie yachtie “you simply must” well heeled enclaves that most of us locals shun, to the picture perfect villages that we also don’t go to that much - certainly not in the holiday season. Then there’s the mysterious east, on the other side of the sparse open spaces of Bodmin Moor, just across the water from Plymouth - quiet snaking river bends, overlooked, underrated by everyone except for the few that know. The buckets and spades at Newquay and Perranporth, and the artists’ havens of St Ives and Newlyn. The surfers, waiting patiently on their boards throughout the seasons at Fistral, Porthtowan, Portreath and Gwithian. There’s the old Cornwall, our equivalent of the pit villages, mining remnants left over from when the few square miles outside the front door were the richest on the planet - all long gone in these poor relation towns of Redruth and Camborne - but it’s this part of the county that’s home to me now after growing up and living in boat lovers’ Falmouth for more than forty years. Love brought me here to share my life with Ali, who has never lived more than a couple of miles from the middle of Redruth. Her roots are entwined through countless generations of this town and I’ve never been happier than I am here. Nowhere else has ever felt quite so much like home to me.
And talking of love, there’s another Cornwall. A timeless and lonely one where the winds howl, the gulls shriek and the wild ocean roars like an approaching thunderstorm on wintry days. The place where you can taste the salt in the air when you stand on the clifftops. You’ll find it in the northern reaches beyond the Camel Estuary, or on the Lizard to the south, and best of all for me, you can embrace it in the far west. Every time I leave that roundabout on the other side of Penzance things begin to change. Often I take the third exit towards St Just and Pendeen, where Cape Cornwall, Porth Nanven, Kenidjack Castle and the incomparable Botallack lie in wait. Each of those locations have seduced me over and over again like a schoolboy who can’t decide which girl he’s got the biggest crush on. Each one sets the pulses charging whenever I even think about going. Just recently, I’ve been taking the second exit rather more often, driving the last nine miles of the mainland along a road that winds and rises gently towards the edge of eternity at Land’s End. At the moment I can’t get enough of the place. Not Shaun the Sheep World obviously. Besides which, the tourists have mostly gone home now. What has been grabbing me though is that there are more than a few compositions to be found here, for which few ever seem to stumble past the classic view of the stacks - the subject of my last story from Land’s End. Judging by the response, it seems many of you like that view too. I’m pretty fond of it myself - even if I don’t take the camera from the bag, I always stop to take it all in again. But as a stand up comedian once said, “come here, there’s more!”
It was the second time in a week I’d perched the tripod on this rock, hanging over the Atlantic as it bashed onto the base of the cliffs fifty or sixty feet below. I mean just look at the textures in those granite walls! I knew there was a shot waiting here, but I hadn’t quite worked it out yet. The previous Monday had delivered neither colour nor contrast and I’d come away with a black and white long exposure, which I liked well enough, but it wasn’t quite ticking my boxes. I couldn’t help feeling that the finished image was leaning very slightly to the right - and by that I don’t mean the horizon needed levelling. Something was needed, just a little something on the left to even things up a bit. But what can you do when there’s nothing there to balance it all? Build another Shaun the Sheep World half a mile out to sea? Consigning the existing one to it might be a better plan. Enough said - I’m supposed to have stopped ranting about the visitor centre now. Nobody forces me to stay there once I’ve parked the van you know.
But now things were a bit more colourful. I’d deliberately chosen today because the sun had finally promised to pierce the grey skies after a prolonged absence. But should I slightly tweak the foreground and find a nice big rock to frame the left? I tried, but it wasn’t working. And then the blindingly obvious appeared in front of me. A bright patch of sunlight and a big yellow beam spreading across the sea in front of the camera. Sometimes that’s all it takes to restore the balance. The long exposure did something else too, both clouds and sea radiating away from Longships towards me to emphasise the distant subject - erm, for which I used a focal length blend if you were wondering. With a wide angle lens it almost vanishes completely if you want to include the textures in those cliffs. Sometimes you need a bit of jiggery pokery if you want your image to resemble the view in front of you. That’s enough of the technical nonsense now. Otherwise the gaps will start to appear very quickly. Besides which, if you’re still reading, your eyelids have probably closed over a couple of times already and I don’t want to send you to sleep.
Next, I really need to try and make it here in time for a winter sunrise. There are other compositions too you see, and they don’t all involve pointing your camera in the same direction. I think I’m going to be here quite often in the coming months. The love affair with another Cornwall isn’t going away anytime soon.
