The October club shoot was sunrise at Thornham, North Norfolk.
A high tide was forecast which is a draw because some good captures can be taken when the road leading to the coal barn is flooded.
We met at 06:15 at the village hall car park because with a high tide, you want to park well away from where the road floods.
I’ve visited twice before at high tide and enjoyed it – the last trip was September 2023.
The shoot
Some folks set up to capture the dead tree stumps, and some of us went to the coal barn and harbour area.
As sunrise time arrived, the sky started to turn an amazing pink colour, and I grabbed my first shot.
I used a relatively slow shutter speed for this shot and I’ve done considerable post processing to enhance the image to try and spruce it up to minimise noise and blur.
A friend of mine suggested I crop the grassy area out in the foreground as it’s distracting, and I agree the following version is much stronger.
I wandered past the barn and grabbed a shot of the harbour to get the colours in the sky.
I felt this was a bit of a ‘nothing’ shot but have cropped it and edited it to try and make something reasonable.
It was literally minutes and this sky had disappeared.
It’s obligatory when there’s a high tide to shoot down the road towards the barn or up on the path / bank, so the latter was where we moved to and I took some shots up there.
I was losing interest on this spot and a fellow photographer said they were pleased with their long exposure shots, and it was something they’d been hoping to get for a while.
I didn’t fancy copying them so I looked around to see what else I could shoot.
I spotted a boat moored up in the distance and thought I’d try and grab a shot and capture the flooded road and partially submerged posts too.
I think this is my favourite shot from the morning – if nothing else, it’s a little bit different.
I did another edit of this scene to attempt a (currently hipster) pastel shade but didn’t think this shot and its base colours worked. There’s a cropped close-up of the boat too.
This was my last shot as it started to rain and we had all decided to start packing our gear away.
It was a wrap.
We wandered back to the car park and some of us called in at the Thornham Deli for a trendy and hearty bacon on sourdough treat with a decent coffee.
A debrief and some good chitchat, and it was time to head home.
I’d regrettably still had doubts about my images for the first club competition of this season so hadn’t yet uploaded them.
With this on my mind, and after procrastinating about the second of my two images, I went with what I had, finished the editing on the one I have doubts about, and submitted them.
There will of course be a blog post coming soon on that first competition night, so get your popcorn ready, put your tin hat on, buckle in and get ready…! 😂
Now it was time to catch up on sleep and I grabbed a couple of hours of shuteye, and with the rain pouring down, had a chilled rest of the day.
Onwards and upwards…