Light is both the most important thing for for a photographer and often the most difficult. I spent a couple of days in West Cornwall doing some research for Graveyard of the Atlantic and making some new images. The one above is a snapshot, a sketch, its a recording of somewhere I might return to and make a proper photograph. I was waiting for the tide to go out fully at Nanjizal Cave, south of Lands End, so I had a quick look around the rest of the beach. This one was mined sometime in it’s past. I always us natural light in these photographs of caves which can be very tricky as this animation demonstrates!
The end result is a combination of most of the 21 frames. I find that you can’t simply make a picture like this using HDR. All of these photos are shot in RAW, processed to jpeg, them loaded into Photoshop layers and manually combined.
This blog has been put aside a little over the last month with a greater concentration on my Facebook posts and with all of the work I seem to have this year including the build-up to my major American exhibition. One of the good suggestions from North Devon’s AONB team, which is funding the exhibition prints through their Sustainable Development Grant, was to include more than just caves. This was a great advice and I’ve been inspired through earlier posts to put my pictures of North Devon’s caves in context through other more general landscapes of the coast here, all be it in extreme weather.
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North devon with the AONB area highlighted |
I?ve just been awarded a grant towards my Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibition at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, April?June 2012 and somewhere in North Devon in 2012. The grant was applied for from the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Sustainable Development Fund. The photographs in the exhibition are all from within the AONB and will do well to promote the North Devon Coast and AONB in Bideford?s twin town in North Carolina, USA. The exhibition will be supported with explanatory text and maps and illustrated talks and workshops.
After June it is planned to move the NC exhibition to the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island. If you would like to host this exhibition in North Carolina, Devon or further afield please email me here: info@davegreenphoto.co.uk
Keyhole Cave, Hartland
I went home to visit my parents recently and I was reminded of an image that has been with my since as far back as I can remember. It?s a print of a painting called ?Song of the Surf? by Ed Mandon. I expect it was a popular print in its day, that being the early 1960?s. I remember often looking into this picture of the sea. Not the pretty turquoise blue of Cornwall or Greece, or the palm tree lined sun bleached cove, the peaceful relaxing sunset or the family snapshot of children paddling in the shallows; no this was Mandon?s deep green sea, wild and free, the waves endlessly crashing in my mind, a vast living breathing entity. The sky, a cold yellow with the threat of rain. It?s a picture that has influenced my subconsciously for a long time. I remember once on Marconi Beach, Cape Cod, I ran down the beach towards the sea and the waves as the holidaymakers ran in the opposite direction, fleeing (as if for their lives) as huge thunderclouds gathered over the ocean.
I?m a lot closer to that deep green wild enticing sea now living in North Devon. And getting closer to it in my own work. ?Song of the Sea?, it certainly calls you; maybe that?s the point, maybe it?s song and call is at its loudest when the sea is in its foulest mood and perhaps that is why the coast here is the ?Graveyard of the Atlantic?.