In The Hours Before Christmas Day - a photo on Flickriver

            We hadn’t really bargained for a bulging car park here on Christmas Eve.  Why wasn’t everyone   else charging about in a frenzy, picking up an extra jar of cranberry sauce and having punch ups in the supermarket aisles over the last tray of pigs in blankets?  Why weren’t they worrying about whether there were enough crackers or sprouts for the dinner table the next day?  I ignored the queue and snuck off to the right into the top car park, which at first seemed to be a bad move until an elderly couple came strolling towards me with intent.  “Are you about to leave?” I asked through a wound down window.  “Yes, we’re just here,” the man pointed to a parked car five yards behind me.  Fortune favours the inventive.  Five minutes later, as I walked down through the melee, apologetic volunteers told waiting drivers that the place was full.  “We’ll get you in as soon as possible,” I heard a lady say to a bored looking man who was stuck in a growing tailback that threatened to block the road down to the King Harry Ferry.  At least I was in, although it was very busy indeed.  At her suggestion I’d come here to meet my daughter and two year old granddaughter for a spot of lunch and a slow amble around our local National Trust garden.  At least once inside the grounds, things seemed a bit more relaxed.  None of us cope well with Christmas.  It all goes a bit too crazy as far as we’re concerned.  People spending money they can’t afford on things that other people neither need nor want.  “Did you keep the receipt?”  Ali and I find it all a lot less stressful now that we no longer buy each other presents.  One of my cousins is in the Witnesses, and while I don’t share her religious convictions, our views on the festive season don’t seem to be that far apart.  Call me Mr Grinch if you like.  If you enjoy this time of year, that’s great - all I ask is to be allowed to sit on the sidelines with a note from Matron.

After lunch, when a very small person needed to go home before the danger nap hour arrived, I was determined to grab a bit of time to myself before surrendering to the madness.  And this was a place where I’d once come to directly from work, immediately after the end of my last ever autumn term, on an afternoon where I’d seen a couple of possibilities that nobody else appeared to have spotted before.  On that drab December day I took shots that promised more than they delivered, and resolved to return with a longer lens and in better conditions.  Now, four years and one day later, I was back again.  The clock had not long struck two in the afternoon, sunset was a little after four, and Ali had given me a shopping list for Tesco in Truro before six.  Which included pigs in blankets.  But they had to be nice ones because we were dining with her family the next day.  Twelve people in one space with all of those awful Christmas songs bouncing off the walls and rattling between my ears.  I refer you to the last few sentences of the first paragraph.

I digress - back to those two compositions I’d seen but never returned to in all this time.  The first of them was proving to be rather frustrating.  Try as I did, it needed a fast shutter and wasn’t working, so with daylight starting to run out, I moved from the beach and up the slope to the other, where the matching headlands on the east side of the Fal Estuary lay bathed in softly glowing winter light.  Last time I tried, it was a tight one to compose with some distractions coming in from the right, but now I had the extra options that the big lens offered, and I was sure this was going to be the time to finally get the shot I’d had in my mind’s eye for so long.  With up to four hundred millimetres at my disposal, isolating the twin headlands seemed straightforward enough.

So imagine my surprise when it quickly dawned on me that the distraction wasn’t a distraction at all.  That instead of the minimal appeal of a long exposure on the two promontories alone, one with the foreground section on the right might  add an element of balance that I hadn’t really considered before.  A faster exposure allowed the scene to come alive with the inclusion of the gulls.  Of course I tried each option, with exposures both short and long.  I liked this one the most.  When I think back to this Yuletide season, I won’t linger on parlour games and that tiresome Slade song that I’ve now had to endure for fifty-two (count them!) consecutive Christmases.  Instead, this is where you’ll find me - standing alone in a peaceful place, and only faintly worrying about whether the local Tesco will have run out of pigs in blankets or if there are enough sprouts in the fridge for us to make it through to the new year without starving.

Taken in: UK / England / Feock / Feock (show map)

Taken on: December 24, 2024

Tags:

Trelissick

Cornwall

coastal

ukcoast

British Coast

cornish coast

Kernow

River

River Fal

trees

tree

silhouette

West Country

west country clickers

Great Britain

Britain

England

glow

Sunset

winter

telephoto

Canon

Canon 100-400 Mk2

Water

seascape

Falmouth

Truro

National Trust « less

Sets appears in: • Truro • Trees more » • Falmouth « less

Groups appears in: • Cornwall • Outdoor Photographer Magazine (Unofficial) more » • UK Coast and Harbour • Beautiful British Coast • Cornwall Flickr Users • Photography Week • Flickr Social « less

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, f/14.0, 1/250 sec, 241mm, ISO 800 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Lens:	EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM
Aperture:	f/14.0
Exposure Time:	0.004 sec (1/250)
Focal Length:	241mm
ISO:	800
Exposure Bias:	-2/3 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 14.1.1 (Windows)
Show full info

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