sunset – Tales from Wild Wales

Once you’ve seen it…….

……… it’s difficult not see it.

I don’t know how many times I had walked to St Davids Head along the undulating coastal path without seeing Coetan Arthur, the neolithic burial chamber. I had walked around it, possibly crawled under it and definitely photographed it in close up but never noticed how clearly it was visible from some distance away. Then one day I must have seen it and now I cannot walk along that section of the path without seeing it. It draws the eye. I don’t believe this a coincidence either; the coastal path presumably follows an ancient route to the promontory fort on the headland itself. The burial chamber must have been sited so prominently for good reason.

I realised on one visit that the burial chamber would be an excellent foreground against which to photograph the sunset – even if it was but a small feature in a big landscape. So, weather permitting, I have now walked there late in the evening several times to see what the sunset would bring. A few days ago I was in St Davids, exhausted after a day on the road visiting my postcard customers. The weather hadn’t been great but I could see a hint of something interesting in the sky as the evening drew on. I grabbed my camera bag and set off.

It turned out be a rather wonderful sunset. After the sun disappeared behind the headland all sorts of oranges and reds appeared in the clouds above it. The burial chamber was silhouetted nicely against this stunning backdrop. So, for a photographer who doesn’t really “do” sunsets, I seemed to have struck lucky again.

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Is that really a thing? (…..or a stunning sunset over Cardigan Bay…..)

*Panoramic image (two frames combined) taken eight minutes after the top one.* *(click to enlarge)*

Last Monday I had to visit my postcard printers in Porthmadog, north Wales, and decided to make it an overnight trip. Leaving home on Sunday afternoon my journey felt rather aimless. The weather had been cloudy and drab for an extended period and there was no guarantee that it would be any better while I was away. I eventually ended up at Fairbourne , right at the mouth of the Mawddach estuary on the southern side – somewhere I very rarely visit. But as the evening slowly drew on I noticed a thinning of the cloud blanket in the west. I decided to go for a walk on the beach.

The sky was beginning to look positively very interesting with broken cloud of various types at different levels. The tide was low and a network of pleasingly shaped pools had formed in the hard sand of the beach. I actually ran back to the van to get my camera bag! Unheard of! I rarely take photos at sunset because the results can be rather predictable, but this, I felt, was an exceptional opportunity.

A few months ago I had bought a very specialised filter specifically for use at times like this. Looking towards the setting sun the light is brightest just above the horizon and gradually fades away towards darkness overhead. The reverse neutral density graduated filter is designed to counter the complex exposure changes that occur in such a situation. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever use it but there it was just sitting in my bag!

Over a period of about twenty minutes I took a series of images of one of the best sunsets I can remember ever seeing ; a complex cloudscape lit up in shades of yellow, orange and finally crimson – all reflected in the sweeping shapes of the pools on the strand. The hilltops and summits of the Pen Llyn extended across the horizon from left to right. Fairbourne itself is not a place of great beauty (or any beauty come to that) but in the right conditions the coastline there can be magical.

To be honest these were not difficult photographs to take. It was more or less a case of “1/125th of a second at f8 and be there”. I posted a couple of the results on an online photo forum and mentioned the use of the filter. One guy replied with the comment “Is that really a thing?” Well, yes, it definitely is a thing, and it works!

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Sunset suite.

Sometimes I come back from a field trip and my partner asks me “Well, how did it go?” Getting me to talk about my experiences can be a bit like getting blood out of a stone. I may be hopeful about the results of a trip but until I’ve processed them I can never be sure. Sometimes the images that looked really great on the screen can be disappointing when seen full size but sometimes the opposite is true. I may not have spoken to anyone for a couple of days and I may have been confined to the van for hours on end, particularly at this time of year. While the process of making landscape images – the minuteae of the weather and the tides, the seasons, f-stops and shutter speeds, the near misses and the successes – can still occasionally be pretty exciting, I imagine this can be difficult to convey to the unitiated. So in recognition of this, I’m just going to show you a few sunsets that I’ve photographed this autumn. Hope you enjoy them!

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