The club landscape trip for February 2023 was sunrise at Cromer, which would be followed by a wander up to the lifeboat station to watch a practice launch of the Cromer lifeboat.
Meet up time was before 05:45-06:00 and we parked up and headed down to the esplanade.
The weather was colder than expected, really windy, no sunlight and that misty sort of rain which soaks you.
Cromer Seascapes
After setting up and trying a couple of shots, it became more obvious that there wasn’t much on offer.
I had packed my camera away but after a while the rain stopped, the light appeared and it was worth taking another look. There was improving light and some nice colours in the sky.
I mainly shot the scene below trying to get interesting patterns from the incoming waves as a foreground to the scene of the pier in the background.
After we’d photographed here, many of us had to nip back to the car park and get a ticket. £5.40 for three hours is robbery, daylight or otherwise!
Anyway, we headed to the lifeboat station at the end of the pier, and many of us found something to take shots of before we reached the station.
I spotted this guy enjoying reading the Sunday paper.
This view from the side delivers an abstract shot through the glass.
Fellow club member Andy pointed out the shapes in this scene.
Lifeboat Launch
We walked up to the viewing gantry inside the station and got ready for the lifeboat to launch.
A little bit of pressure was felt in terms of camera settings since the launch is a once only today type of event. Luckily, a fellow club member had done this before so gave me some advice.
I went for 1/800sec shutter speed to capture the boat and any water splashes, a smallish aperture to ensure all the detail was captured (I wasn’t sure if my aperture went narrower by mistake during the launch).
ISO needed to be at 800 because the station was quite dark inside. As the launch started, I fired off loads of frames having set the camera to 15fps.
Although the camera preview gave me “blinkies” (flashing zebra pattern on parts of the image were the highlights are blown, or overexposed), I was able to dial the whites and exposure back in post production/editing of the Raw file, and add a bit of texture to bring out the detail in that dramatic splash.
I really enjoyed the excitement and challenge of shooting the lifeboat launch, and it’s something I would do again.
All in all, an enjoyable morning with some keeper shots in the bag.
Onwards and upwards…