Random Seens

Rain and light

Rain and rainbows, Brittany

Very lucky to have enjoyed two weeks' sailing, from southern England over to northern Brittany via the Channel Islands and Iles Chausey - which chiefly accounts for the lack of blog posts recently. 

The Brittany coast is a fascinating sailing ground: pretty but fantastically rock-strewn and with an astonishing tidal range - typically more than 10 metres if you can imagine that. In other words when the tide is in it can easily swallow your average house, and then some.  

And when it goes out it reveals rocks that are ... bigger than your house. Navigation is more than ever by the numbers. 

We had great weather, for the most part: good breezes, and only one day's real rain - but some sharp late afternoon showers in the delightful little town of St-Cast-le-Guildo. This has a very new marina, with excellent facilities - albeit more exposed to (south-) westerlies than you might think from looking at the map. 

A five-minute walk away from the boats is a headland, with a huge cannon commemorating some famous battle they did not teach us about in school in England. Ah - probably because it did not go terribly well.

Anyway it has a marvellous view over the Pointe de Saint Cast and other headlands to the north, one with the magnificent Fort Latte, and beyond that, Cap Frehel with its lighthouses. 

As the heavy showers went through I huddled in the lee of a convenient large bush atop what was otherwise an exposed bluff, emerging to venture down the slope overlooking the sea to make my  photographs.  

The clouds were huge, the sun more-or-less broke through - and to cap it all, after about an hour's wait, a stunning rainbow (briefly, to the south, a double one) completed the scene.

I have a number of pictures from this location that needed minimal post-processing. I'm very pleased with them. 

We rounded off the day with fresh local seafood and a few pichets de vin rouge. 

Sailing trips revisited

I was sort of volunteered (!) to make up a photo display board to promote the Ariel Yacht Club, through which I do a lot of my sailing, as part of an open day for the overall BBC Club (social activities for staff and affiliates). Happy to oblige, I spent a very pleasant day sifting through photos from sailing trips in the Solent, the West Country, Scilly Isles, Brittany and the Inner Hebrides from the past few years, reliving memories of the people, places and weather. I pulled out 20 shots that I felt were representative of what the club is about. These I printed on A4 photo paper with short captions - figuring it was better to try to make a fair-sized impact for a display of this sort than have a hundred cluttered little shots. As you can see the overall result is generally blue. This is partly because the club’s constitution states that sailing must only take place in sunshine. Appropriately we were blessed with fine weather this lunchtime for the event, which took place on the greensward outside the White City building in west London. Our commodore, John Harmer (left in picture), had pitched us alongside the dinghy section, who had brought along two dinghies to promote themselves and by extension, he reasoned, other people who sail. As it would have been hard for us to have put a couple of yachts on there, the photos were at least better than thin air in helping to make a good impression and in fact seemed to go down rather well. So that was worthwhile. Thanks by the way to Christella Robertson and to Nick Watson who shot two of the pictures.

New venture

I’ve been working hard this week on keywording and uploading photos for a new commercial development that I’m really excited about. Here’s a flavour. More soon I hope. Back to Lightroom. 

Going with the flow

Prospero in action: more at Your Boat here.

On a boat, everything is moving. The water moves, the boat moves so the deck moves, you move, your arms move and the camera moves, the thing you’re trying to shoot moves - independently. It’s a very moving experience. Stick on a long lens as well, and getting your target in frame can become a somewhat random exercise!

Sailing at the weekend in the Solent, I rattled off a load of shots of other boats. Among them we also came across my club’s other boat, Prospero, doing some practice for the Warsash Spring Series race the next day (subsequently cancelled for lack of wind). They sure were having fun…