Beachy Head Lighthouse | Weekly Photo #68
I reckon I’m not the only person that does this but when I visit specific locations such as Beachy Head Lighthouse here, I research just a little about it. Not just how to get there, when the best light will be but also why it was built, who built it, how old it is, what stories does it tell. Apart from finding the history of places like this fascinating, it changes how I look at the subject and how I might photograph it.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF18-55mm | 18mm | 1/15th Second | f/13 | ISO200
Back in 2011, the owners announced they couldn’t afford the £27,000 needed to repaint the Lighthouse and declared it would be left to fade back to a granite grey colour. That would have been the case if it weren’t for a sponsored campaign which raised the funds and had the structure repainted. Read more on Wikipedia here. When I edited this photo, I knew how close lighthouse had come to losing its colour, so, in post-production, I made sure to spend a bit of time focusing on the lighthouse so those fantastic, vibrant colours remained a feature in the final image.
Photographing Beach Head Lighthouse
A few months ago, after checking the low tide times aligned with sunset, a friend and I set off along the rocky beach near Eastbourne in East Sussex to photograph this cracking coastal subject.
For tidal rivers and coastlines, I use an app called My Tide Times which tells me the high and low tide times for a given location. The app is available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
After about an hour of dodging rock pools and clambering over boulders, we arrived at the lighthouse and began hunting around for compositions. My intention was to use the reflection of the lighthouse in the pools of water left by the outgoing tide to create some foreground interest but as I wandered around, I found this layered composition with the rocks anchoring the image in the foreground, the pool of water and reflections in the midground and to top it off, a cracking lead-in line taking the eye from the bottom left corner, diagonally across the scene towards the lighthouse.
Along with the trusty Fujifilm XT2 camera, I had both my 18-55mm standard zoom and wide-angle 10-24mm and although the wide-angle would have emphasised the rocks in the foreground, I decided to keep the standard zoom for this shot as a wider angle would have pushed the lighthouse too far into the background for my liking and I didn’t want to confuse what I deemed the main subject of the shot.
Dialling in an aperture of f/13 to keep the rocks in focus, with the camera mounted on the tripod and image composed, I went about taking the photo.
Although the sky could have put on a bigger show, I’m still pretty happy with this photo and in a way, the more subtle colours mean the lighthouse stands out that little bit more.
After an hour or so of shooting, we noticed the tide heading back in and with a long walk back around the beach and up the cliffs, that was our cue to start heading home.
Until next week.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.