With high tides along North Norfolk, a fellow club member suggested Sheringham for sunrise.
Meet time was a very comfortable 06:50 and as the clocks are due to change this weekend, the meet time will get progressively earlier now for a while.
We walked down to the promenade and along it doing a bit of a recce for shots. Lots of groynes, railings, rocks and other opportunities for shots.
Nothing from the promenade along the edge of the coast took my fancy so I concentrated on my usual favourite thing of swooshery with some railings.
First up was from these steps down to the beach – I love this shot but if I look at it since, I see the annoyance of the railing cutting into the rock on the right-hand side. Getting the tripod down lower may have avoided this and made it a more rounded effort.
I moved to take the scene straight on but the railings are lost in the scene:
I then moved right to shoot the scene from the other side.
The occasional bigger inbound wave was going to soak me and my camera gear, so I walked back up the steps to take a shot of these railings from higher up.
I walked back along the promenade to this slope where my eye quickly spotted the swooshery potential!
I set up and began taking images like the one below which I really like:
Of course, no seascape shoot would be valid without a monochrome edit, and a long exposure. Below I offer up a mono (a blatant conversion with no real effort) but I didn’t do any long exposures or ICM on this occasion.
I took various shots at different shutter speeds to get the right texture in the waves for my favourite type of shot.
I realised that the metallic bar at the top of the steps were too close so tried to move my tripod back but I was hindered by the railings on the promenade.
I posted to social media another shot of exactly the same composition but with a bit more water around the metal ladder, and I cropped in closer for the viewer to admire the textures.
When thinking about whether or not this shot would be good enough for a competition, I immediately now critique this scene!
The position of one of the vertical railings is right behind the metallic ladder which causes a distraction and irritation to the image – see below:
Go back, change your position and do it again I can hear a judge advising. However, where I was standing, it was impossible to do that as I was as far back as I could be against a set of railings on the promenade.
The only other option is to shoot this scene from further away and use a longer lens, which is doable.
My main learning is I need to stop, pause, and double-check my shots on location, and adjust at the time. Lucky for me, I live locally so it’s perfectly possible to go back and try again.
Late edit: coincidentally, a fellow club member has posted a very similar image and achieved the separation between the ladder and the railings I was missing, so I must’ve missed either somewhere different and/or adjusting my tripod higher up.
At this point in the shoot, we were done, it was a wrap.
We walked back along the promenade and spotted a café so popped in to ask if they did bacon rolls. No, came the answer. We looked at each other and the silent pause pretty quickly told the server of our disappointment, so we left and carried on along the promenade.
There’s not been much luck in grabbing some breakfast in this area in recent weeks – cafés at Cromer appearing open but not (although they got the benefit of the doubt as it could be a license thing at the pre 08:00 time we called in) and here in Sheringham a café that doesn’t do bacon!
As we approached the steps on the promenade which would take us back to our cars, we spotted what looked like a burger van with its chimney smoking away. This looked very promising…
When we reached the van-like vehicle, it turned it out to be a mobile sauna! Very handy for the person we observed who had just finished their swim in the sea, but bugger all help to our salivating mouths wanting bacon rolls!
We climbed the steps and went up to the model boating lake to see if there was ‘that’ shot to find one of our group set up and having a go.
Unfortunately, there was a breeze and therefore the water was moving so I didn’t bother getting my gear out again. I took a phone shot below:
We wandered back to our cars for a flask coffee and a debrief/chat before driving off.
To complete the morning, my customary breakfast treat courtesy of Ronald was served at Cromer and that was that.
Onwards and upwards…