The first stop on our trip was Botallack mines. We headed here first for the landscapes and flower and then finished the trip photographing the sunset at Land's End. You may recognise the mines as the setting for some of the new (remade) T.V. show 'Poldark'. The problem with doing a couple of locations in a day, is that you have to be at one of them at mid-day, meaning that you have to photograph in the harsh sunlight - of course though it is still nice to visit the location and you can get some really nice shots. I would like to return to Botallack and sunset to photograph this same landscape again. In a couple of weeks it may be better though, as that is when the flowers will be in full bloom. In the picture above, you can see Sea Campion (Silene uniflora) and Thrift (Armeria maritima). If I was to take this again, I would go slightly lower down the slope and have more of the flowers in the frame than in this shot - although I do also like the waves around the rocks in the lower left corner.
| To the right is a macro shot of the pink flowers you can see in the above landscape - Thrift. The benefit of shooting at this time of day is that the blue skies make for a really nice background. Thrift grows in large mounds/groups and so you can make nice compositions which show this off. In this image, I chose to have the unopened flowers as foreground and have the open Thrift as the main element. This means that you are not distracted by the foreground but you get a feel for the scene. Also, by placing a flower in front of the stem, it helps create the illusion of more foreground than there actually is. |  |
  | The majority of the photographs that I got from the trip were taken at Land's End, due to the great light and I will show them lower down. Yet I really like this shot of a male Stonechat. I really enjoy this form of image, in which the subject is shown within the context of its environment. This Stonechat, along with a female were surveying this area for a good half an hour, which allowed plenty of time to get a shot. There was already a photographer from my course photographing these and had approached really well, so I didn't want to ruin it for them. This was the reason I chose to photograph it like this. I went behind where the other photographer was and slowly got into position behind a wall and framed this shot up. I used a large depth of field (F/11), to ensure that all of the scene was in focus and then bring some aspect of the distant background into play. In the background you can see the large fields that approach the cliffs and drop off suddenly into the sea. The image is actually a stitch of two images, once I took the first I moved the camera to the right and took another with the gorse in the bottom right. However in that second image the Stonechat was looking away and so I merged the two together in Photoshop. |
I think that this post would be too long to have as a single post and so I am splitting it into two parts, this is the end of part 1, but I will be posting images over on Facebook (click here - Alex Greene Natural History Photography) for the next few days and then I will return to write part 2...
Thanks for reading, I hope you like the pictures and I encourage you to get down to see these wonderful landscapes if you get the chance.
Thanks for reading, I hope you like the pictures and I encourage you to get down to see these wonderful landscapes if you get the chance.
