Cuckmere Haven / HalewoodPhotographic.com

Landscape Photography is still probably my most loved genre within photography, but there isn't many I do not like. I'm not a great fan of brushed up studio portraits and I can't see me ever pouring my heart into child or pet photography, but I'd still be willing to give everything a go! I noticed this week that the landscape photographer of the year awards for 2012 were announced, and what a great collection of photographs they were. The winner was a haunting black and white picture taken at Lindisfarne beach, which had superb depth of field to it. My personal favourite was this one, and you can see all the other pictures through that link.

One of my favourite photographers is Charlie Waite and I was delighted to see that he is one of the judges on the panel. His work for me has so much character and that's what I find appealing about all his images. You only have to work at the gallery page (click link) on his website to understand how I am so inspired by his work. Another thing I like, and this is perhaps why I love landscape photography in general, is the picture is what it is, there are no arty farty type messages mixed in or statements, which I have always found off-putting and overrated. There are books you can buy that actually explain to you why a certain photograph is great, even though I reckon 99% of the population see nothing interesting at all. I'd rather appeal to the 99%, not the fickle 1%. And if you have to explain why a photograph is great, then I doubt it's for most people anyway.

Another reason I mentioned Charlie Waite though is that it was through watching him on a TV programme once that led me to want to photograph the scene in today's picture, Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex. I finally had the opportunity to do that a few weeks ago and it is certainly one of the most unique landscapes in the British Isles. The wonderful thing about landscape photography, which includes great landscape such as this, is that it will always be different every time you visit because of the changing time and light, and therefore I see no reason not head back there again.

HalewoodPhotographic.com

I wanted to mention my own gallery website today because I have spent the last 2 weeks giving it a bit of a 'service'. It is actually one of the longest running websites I have, though I have never really done much with it. It's hosted by the smugmug guys, which I know are very popular with a lot of photographers but I have tended to have a love/hate relationship with. When I first joined a couple of years ago, I found the functionality very poor, unless you were of course wonderful at entering html and other coding that means jack to me. So it always seemed like a mountain to climb to get a decent website running out of it and many times I did consider cancelling my subscription (had I found that easy to do, I probably would have done it!). But as fate would have it, after appearing on the Liverpool FC website a couple of weeks ago, I had an enquiry from a lady who said she couldn't find anywhere on the web to buy a copy of one of my prints. That made sense because I'd stopped promoting any kind of web-sales site long ago, as I wanted to focus totally on just producing new pictures and seeing where that takes me. I wanted to help as well though, so pointed her to my smugmug site, and indeed like to think I have a very happy customer now.

So then I decided I would try and make something out of this website and am glad I took the effort to do it now. One of the only things that has kept HalewoodPhotographic.com going is the fact that all my photos that appear on this site are hosted from that site. I have a total of 8 galleries there now, the first one of which is simply called 'Blog' where you can find absolutely every picture that has ever appeared on this site. The remaining 7 are taken from my '7 Galleries' that appear on my official website HalewoodPhoto.com.

I am not a shopkeeper or a salesman, but I have totally over-hauled my prices on there, which range from £40 to £300+ for one of the more expensive type print formats. I have seen other peoples smugmug sites and find that they have way too many prices on there, which are simply a minefield for a prospective customer. With that in consideration, there are only 12 separate prices and products on mine, and are all priced in British Sterling (for Queen and country!), though this can be changed in the Buy Photo section.

I have linked it probably one too many times already but if you missed it, here is the link again, I'd love you to have a look! HalewoodPhotographic.com.

Cuckmere Gate

First of all, apologies for the blog being so late in the day. I have spent the best part of the last 2 days in Germany and had no wifi access as expected, therefore could not upload a blog. Anyway, I'm sure you are not that interested in that story, so I'll just get on with the photo.

This landscape picture is from Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex. If you read this blog regularly, you will know that the Grass Snake photo I posted on sunday was also taken at Cuckmere Haven. It was for landscape pictures that I went to this place though, and despite visiting during the middle of the day (any advice you read saying you can only take landscape pictures at dawn or dusk should be promptly treated as suspicious, as I think this warrants a crime against your creativity as a photographer), I came away with some pleasing (my opinion of course) photographs. The main attraction is the winding river as it makes its way to the English Channel, which is great to picture from the heights of the surrounding hills. If you stop and look around though, you will find other little gems to picture in the area and this little gate and small waterway made me think of the English countryside, which of course it is a part of.

This is a non-HDR picture, and although I did take 5 bracketed exposures of this scene, I just felt in post-processing that it didn't need the HDR treatment. However, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to find out what it might look like either.....

Natrix natrix...but we just call it a Grass Snake

Although I say I have only developed a passion for photography in the last 2 and a half years, my first love of photography began in my teens. I loved natural history documentaries, especially the legendary David Attenbrough's programmes, and grew a keen interest in wanting to photograph the local wildlife around me. Even though people bought me books on wildlife photography to inspire me more, the fact that digital photography was still years away, and whilst I was still at school, to afford any kind of equipment to get the pictures I was seeing in the books, would have just been unheard of for a 13/14 year old boy. It's easy for me to say now, that out of all the disciplines of photography, I would still rate wildlife photography as the hardest. This is simply because (perhaps along with sport) you do not have time to plan the shot. I know you can go out searching for a subject and plan how the photo will look, but when the subject turns up, you just have to snap away, hoping your settings you selected at lightening speed will pull off a gem amongst the many photos you rapidly fired off. Nearly every photograph even professional photographers take gets rejected, but the ratio of wildlife photographers pictures that are taken compared to what gets published, must be ridiculously small. It's one thing to capture the animal of whatever kind, it's another thing to have an interesting picture of that creature i.e. in a wonderful surrounding, displaying some unusual behaviour, a genius composition etc.

Anyways, that is looking at the hard work of it. The fun side is just saying to myself that this Snake I came across on Cuckmere Haven last weekend, absolutely made my day! I spent the weekend in Eastbourne on a sort of break after my wedding (I don't want to say honeymoon, as that probably won't be for a few months yet), and Cuckmere Haven was the last place I wanted to visit, as I knew it is a favourite location of one of my favourite photographers, Charlie Waite. It's a fantastic landscape to capture, but the last thing I expected to see was a Grass Snake! I was coming down the hill towards the river when this Snake, slithered (I almost wrote sprinted then) out in front of me at speed. Now I have seen Grass Snakes out and about before, but again the moment is normally as fleeting as the speed at which it takes the Snake to find cover in the nearest bush or undergrowth. However, true to it's name, there is nothing but short grass on the hill surrounding Cuckmere haven at this time of year. So I was able to chase it down the hill for a long time, whilst stopping occasionally, to try and get as close to the snake as possible, whilst firing off many pictures.

One thing you have to know about Grass Snakes, is that despite being the largest Snake in the British Isles (we only have 3!), it really is not that big. I've been looking at other pictures of grass snake on the net since, and though there are indeed some great pictures, with interesting surroundings, nearly all of them are cropped below 1000pixels across. I have cropped this picture, but still to just above 3000pixels, because although I could crop in closer and still keep the detail, I wanted to get as much of the snake in the shot as possible. Who knows though, maybe I will put a closer shot in another day. Wildlife photography remains a keen interest of mine, but I know that until I can afford all of that 'glass', I'll still have fun capturing these little opportunities that present themselves.