Taking photos on the coast at Filey

Taking photos is something I've really gotten into this last year. Now Doug and I are quite good at setting shots up and making most things look right in a few attempts sometimes even first time in the case of this wire wool orb I did yesterday.

We have been more adventurous with our locations for taking photos, and gained an extra guy who joins us two weekends ago I was traipsing around at the bottom of a waterfall collecting bottles filled with glow sticks this weekend we went to the coast. It was nice a warm and the only thing we had to worry about two things:

seals (they were actually really relaxed about us being so close)

waves (That's Frantz and I)

So by the time we got out on the rocks at low tide it was already starting to get dark so again I did not have to use my ND filter. I took some long exposures of the water going over the rocks.

rocks...

Then we did some some light painting.

this was a strange building right buy the water

that's Filey in the background

One other thing to note is the walkie talkies were so helpful as with the waterfall the sea makes a lot of noise. Today we were out for about 3 hours but the water was not cold and we didn't have to walk to far to get to our spot unlike with the waterfall last time, so although I was really tired at about 1am when we finished it was no where near a tiring. It did take a long time to get home and after a end of holiday Mc Donald's and putting my photos on dropbox it was about 4am when I finally got to sleep. I now have to break my sleep cycle and go to work tomorrow, it will be nice to see everyone.

Ingleton waterfall photos

I was recently inspired by some photos I saw online here of someone doing long exposure light painting (my favorite style currently) using a waterfall and floating glow sticks down it. I thought I'd have a go myself and arranged a camping trip to a land filled with waterfalls (Ingleton) in the hope we would find somewhere suitable. We went on the waterfall walk during the day with some friends and decided when it was getting dark we would drive as close as we could and walk for an hour to get back to the best waterfall we had seen that day and try the shot.

On the way we stopped off at a small village with some cute stepping stones, which was fun.

that's me at the back

Then we did the waterfall walk for the afternoon, it was a bit too busy to take photos so even though I took everything tripod and all I didn't bother. Doug's housemate did take a cool shot of us under the waterfall (we swam to it) 

Doug and I doing a Hi 5

In the evening we went back and took some long exposures in what must have been close to the golden hour. I got one really nice shot which I'm very please with.

I remember hating these blurry shots as a kid "It does not look like that I thought", now I see it as art

Then it got dark, that's when things got difficult. It was really, really difficult to get enough light and it was too loud to hear each other, I had to go in the water to get the glow sticks and it was cold and slippery and Doug had to keep running up and down a big hill. So for next time I got some walkie talkies which are already proving useful and some LED wands to use instead of glow sticks. So I'm not very impressed with the results as they are too blurry and noisy but I'm posting them so in future you can see how much I improved my shots.

look how much brighter the one LED wand is in compassion!

I accidentally shone my torch chasing a glow stick before the exposure finished and spoil this a bit, so it took a lot of editing to stop the rock to the right looking really bright.

It was a really good learning experience and it was fun trying to work out how to do the shot. When Doug was up at the top he shone a laser on the rock face above the water fall to do a count down so we released our shutters on time. It was a bit of a mission but I will get a better version of this shot in the future.