Northumberland – What A Wonderful Place to Visit and Photograph

The regular readers amongst you will know that I’ve now been given permission to drive and start to do normal life again. This is following the surgery on my hand, I didn’t really think about not being able to do things after the surgery on my left hand, as we went into Covid lockdown the week after. This weekend was my first proper photography shoot for a good while. The destination was Seahouses on the Northumberland Coast. This was the base for a few days but there is lots to look at and photograph.

Seascapes

It’s fair so say that there are a fair few opportunities for Seascape photography in this neck of the woods. I was determined to try to get at least one sunrise shoot during the long weekend. The good thing about being “up north” is that sunrise and sunset are earlier than they are in and around Manchester. In fact sunrise this last weekend was 8.30am, not bad when you find it hard to get out of bed for sunrise shoots.

When I woke on Saturday I looked out of the window and to my delight (1) it wasn’t raining, and (2) there was a pinky tinge in the few clouds I could see. That felt like an opportunity to get a few sunrise seascape images. We stayed right next to the beach at Seahouses so It wasn’t a long walk to the beach. I had in my minds eye a seascape that was rocks, and sea and a nice sky, I think you’ll agree that the image above ticks all of those boxes. Yes Seahouses has a harbour with quaint boats etc but that wasn’t what I had in mind. I like the lines in the rocks that lead the eye through the image as well as sea crashing waves onto the beach and the clouds and sun in the background. I do like this image. It was shot on my Sony Alpha 7 IV, with the 24 to 70 GM Mark II lens, at 34mm, with Iso 100 and aperture at f11.

My research told me that another great place to visit was Craster, maybe 10 miles south of Seahouses. A lovely quaint fishing village with a rocky coastline and a castle that is very walkable. The walk from Craster to Dunstanburgh Castle is pretty obvious one to do when you get to Craster, the castle dominates the view and the rolling fields that lead down to the beach mean easy walking. As we walked towards the castle there were various rock formations but what struck me as we walked was that there was such a huge amount of sea foam. There are scientific reasons why it forms but lets just say that its the motion of the sea and the location that combine on these occasions to form the foam. As you can see from the above image there is a lot. Over the years the motion of the sea has eroded the land and I liked the look of the way the rocks on both sides are covered in the foam and almost funnel the foam trades the beach. Moody sky adds to the image along with a slight Vignette in post processing. This was a hand held shot on my Sony Alpha 7 IV, with the 24 to 70 GM mark II lens at 24mm at f8, ISO 100.

Castles

I love castles, and there are quite a few (I mean a lot) of them dotted all over Northumberland. On Saturday we took a walk along the beach from Seahouses to Bamburgh Castle. All along this walk there are some huge sand dunes. A couple of times we started to head inti the dunes as we saw (what turned out to be) stray buildings that we thought were part of the castle. Eventually we came across Bamburgh Castle and this next image is taken from the beach and tries to give context to the castle in amongst the dunes.

The castle here is not huge in comparison to some and has elements of it through the ages but it is well worth a visit.

This image gives the castle a sense of its place in the landscape, it’s not the best composition but it does show allow the viewer to get a sense of the castle as you approach. You see it all the way from the village at Craster. To be fair the fencing adds a little bit of interest to the foreground which then leads on to the rest of the beach and finally onto the castle itself on the hill. There was a big sky on Sunday, with big clouds, and whilst some would say to minimise the sky in landscape shots, I think the sky adds “bigness” to the scale of the image. You get a sense of scale if you look closely as there are a few hardy souls braving the wind and rain to walk up to the castle.

A wonderful weekend, in a location that I will certainly look to visit again and again over the coming years.