I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT
West Cork is a location that I’ve not visited in a long time, and I’ve never recorded a vlog from this location before now either, so today I was going to change that and head down the road west to see what delights awaited me.
Passing through Clonakilty, and taking a quick stop for supplies, before taking the scenic route onwards towards the sea. The coastal area here, while not as dramatic as Kerry, has plenty to offer from a seascape point of view and as I rounded the bend, the first of two beaches lay before me.
Owenahincha Beach is a place I have visited many times as a kid with my family, and while beautiful the main thing that stuck in my mind was the fact that the rip current here can be quite strong and the advice was not to swim there. It is an expansive beach with some outcropping cliffs and rocks, which in the right conditions would yield some great shots, however, on this occasion, I decided to drive on, up and over the next cliffs, and down to the adjoining beach, Long Strong. It gets its name due to its length. almost 2km long with uninterrupted sandy undulations, with some random rocks acting as foreground elements.
As I arrived on location, the conditions seemed quite favourable, the sky had some high-level clouds, and the waves were crashing nicely against form rocks that are just 50 meters in, so I decided that these would be my first compositions as I waited to see what the sky and light would deliver later. I had arrived an hour before sunset, plenty of time to explore, find and fine-tune any composition that I found, and as I set up my first shot, little did I know what lay ahead of me.
The waves were breaking perfectly for me, hitting the rocks and curving around them before returning once again to the sea, leaving a fantastic trail of foam behind them, so I set up my camera, put on my 0.9 ND grad to help control the sky and set about taking my first shots. The texture in these rocks was great and add to this the texture in the water as it arrived, really helped bring the scene to life for me. I was happy with the early signs looking at the back of the camera and noticed that the water was creating some great shapes in the shots, so decided to adjust my composition now to use the set of rocks that had been on the right side of my frame as the subjects for the next.
Switching now to portrait orientation, I placed these rocks on the right of the frame, the left side would be left clear for an incoming wave to arrive and fill it with its movement, both inwards and again as it flowed out. it was at this time, unbeknown to me, that my technology decided to fail me, My wireless microphone stopped, which meant I now had no audio for my video. As I spoke so elegantly and fluidly, I had no idea that all of this was now going to be lost, nonetheless, I was here for photography after all, and I was glad I was, the scene was getting better and better as time went on.
The subject of my second composition, those jagged rocks, would now become the subject of my third composition as there was a gap in them that when a wave arrived, it would shoot through with great force, allowing me to capture the flow and power with a 0.5-second exposure. As I stood there taking shot after shot, I watched the sky closely. The sun was soon setting and while there weren’t many colours as such, there was the challenge of dealing with the highlights, which if I wasn’t careful would blow completely. even with this cautiousness, I still had some frames in which the sky was slightly blown. Nothing that would ruin the shot, but still something that if I wasn’t extra careful would.
The sun had dipped now behind the cliffs to my right, which meant that my subjects were going to be in shade, I could have headed back east along the beach to stay in the light, but there was no foreground there to shoot, so instead, I opted to head right, and into an even darker area of the beach to find my next subject. This subject took the form of a juxtaposition of sorts. the river flows into the sea at this point which meant that I had a constant flow of water from the land to the sea, Combine this with incoming waves and you had a point where the river meets the sea, and this was something that I set about trying to photograph. It was a difficult composition, due to the darkness of the rocks, the shade that they were in and the sky high above still being lit up by the setting sun. Nonetheless, I composed my shot and waited for an incoming wave to break before me and, mix with the freshwater from the river.
While reviewing my images, and looking at the flow of the incoming waves, I realised that my moment for the ideal juxtaposition had passed, and as the sky was finally about to yield come colour I opted to put on my 10-stop filter and go for a long exposure, and after a 30-second text shot I knew I would need to go longer! 1 because the light at that corner of the beach was quickly disappearing and 2 because the ebb and flow of the waves would need an ultra-long exposure to fill the frame from many waves that would tenderly arrive on the rocks below me, so I put the camera on bulb mode, and let it count up and past 3 minutes.
The sun had set now but my shoot wasn’t over, looking back towards the east, I once again was drawn back to the first set of rocks that had delivered my earlier shots, the tide had receded so much at this stage that they were no longer being subjected to crashing waves but were instead being lapped tenderly by the tail end of each wave as it just managed to reach them, to the east also was the headland of Galley Head and sitting proudly on this was Galley Head lighthouse, and finally, above this, the clouds seemed to have some residual colour.
As I approached the scene I opted to not photograph the entire rocks for this one, I instead used the last rock only, and placed it at the bottom left of the frame, to act as an anchor as such, it was then I noticed the great detail that this once rock had, which I felt would work well for an image, so framing up my shot, I left enough room at the bottom for an incoming wave to fill, albeit as it retreated out to see and left some stunning curves and lines behind it from its foam, all of this I could capture with a longer exposure, so put my camera at 2 seconds and hit that shutter as the wave reached its peak and started to then turn, the light was fading fast.
As I packed up my bag to head back to the van, I was happy with my shots and also the contact that I had recorded, I explained each shot well I felt and also thought that someone watching would learn a thing or two about how I approached the shots. You can imagine my dismay when I got back home and found that I had very little audio and that the hard work would be gone.
I decided to still release the video, albeit with a smooth voiceover explaining each scene as I mentioned earlier I was there for photography and was happy with the shots. Would the video stand up? You can watch it on the link below and see
You can see the images I managed to capture in the gallery below or watch the adventure on the Youtube video from Sunday at 5 pm
