The second coastal venue on my trip to Northumberland in 2014 was a dawn visit to Bamburgh Castle, another fabulous location for landscape photography.
Morning is by far the best time to photograph the east coast, however, what I had not fully appreciated in 2014 was the angle of the sun during February. To my surprise it was rising just to the left of the castle meaning that most of my shots were directly into the light.
This was unlike previous visits to Northumberland in May/June, when there was more side lighting on the castle with the sun rising over the Farne Islands. Of course, I could have worked all this out prior to the visit but it never occurred to me to make the check.
As a result, many of the photographs I took that morning didn’t get processed at the time. I felt that my main subject, the castle, had no detail and stood in silhouette in most of the shots. Much of the foreground was similar. I tried to resolve this in software but ran into problems with digital noise and a forced processing look to the final photographs.
Seven years later, I treated the photographs as they were, rather than as I wanted them to be in 2014. The results were a pleasant surprise. My favourite is shown below where I concentrated on the real subject which was the morning light and the reflection off the sandy beach - it also just happens to have a castle on the horizon!
With this image completed I started looking at others taken on the same morning, applying a similar approach. This led to a sequence of photographs from dawn through to sunrise (about 45 minutes), all similar in composition but with different foregrounds. These were the dawn shots:
The next sequence charts the sunrise:
Once the sun had fully risen, I did what I would have done today from the outset and turned around to use the light rather than trying fight it - contre-jour. I will show these results in the next post.
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