Thanks to my wife Kathryn, I was the lucky recipient of a voucher for a photography workshop with pro photographer Justin Minns.
Justin is a well-known and respected photographer in this region and author of the excellent Photographing East Anglia Fotovue book.
He has more recently also published a book on photographing Essex (Explore & Discover Essex), and both books are highly recommended – I have both books, so what further endorsement can you need?
Chosen workshop
Justin is so good at his profession and tuition that his workshops sell out like hot cakes well in advance.
The Suffolk in Summer workshop would focus on the flowers on display at this time of year at Suffolk locations Aldeburgh and Shingle Street.
Workshop participants including me were to meet Justin in Aldeburgh at 14:30 and we would then have supper in a pub in Butley, before moving onto Shingle Street for sunset.
The shoot
Four other photographers and myself met Justin in Aldeburgh and after he explained what we would be doing, he took us to the beach and gave us some ideas of what and how to shoot.
We would use the flowers as a focal point, but there was a lot of options.
Below is one of my first shots, which I really like because of the bird which I didn’t realise I’d caught at the time.
My only criticism of this shot is the ‘flat’ composition, I.e. no angle or dynamism.
I did a lot of shots here, tried some ICM shots, as the montage below illustrates:
A few shots were snagged using a wider aperture to focus on the flowers and throw the background out of focus.
It was time to look for something different, so I took some of this digger making the ropes the foreground interest.
A couple more of the boat and the flowers including another ICM shot.
Next up is a classic boat shot from Aldeburgh beach and a composition which Justin suggested we grabbed.
A low down composition just catches the front side of a boat but with the focus on the boat further away.
I couldn’t help myself but ‘doctor’ the classic boat shot to replace any ‘Ipswich’ reference to ‘Norwich’ especially as I discovered Justin is a “binner” (a name used to reference fans of Ipswich Town).
I won’t hold it against him though… but it’s sure to feature in future interactions!
Some more shots around this area of the beach are shown below.
We left Aldeburgh and headed off for our supper to a hostelry in Butley.
It was then off to Shingle Street.
We started by taking shots of flower meadows with the cottages in the background.
I really struggled here to get proper focus, and of the few I did capture, I notice in post-production there’s a lot of bugs and flies in the sky, therefore those images are in the bin.
I had greater success with some more intimate flower shots.
I was enjoying shooting these, and wandered around to find this thistle plant.
For our final location, we moved up to the row of coastguard cottages to take some shots as the sunset developed.
We then moved away from this area to shoot some shots looking back at the coastguards’ houses, and by this time the sunset really looked good.
I did a few shots here trying to get a decent composition – I like the portrait below as there’s plenty of foreground interest with lots of flowers.
I then grabbed some shots in landscape orientation and used filters to slow the shutter speed down to get movement in the clouds.
And that was a wrap.
The evening light was now rapidly disappearing and so we packed up and made our way to our cars.
I had a brief thought about a potential Astro shot at Aldeburgh but Justin said he thought there was too much cloud, and I was surprisingly knackered.
I got back home just before midnight but had a great time.
Justin is a superb tutor, good company (for a ‘blue’), and highly recommended.
Onwards and upwards…