- Jamie Dean
Seven Sisters Country Park, East Sussex.
When a friend asked if I wanted to travel down to the south coast with our cameras to do a day of photography I jumped at the chance. I haven't really had the opportunity to get out in to the countryside with my camera since lockdown. I decided to pack towards the wider side, lens wise. I had the 24-70mm f2.8 attached to the my Nikon D800 and the 16-35mm f4, both in the Billingham Hadley bag. I also brought along the Gitzo tripod too. It wasn't an early start unfortunately and after a rather congested journey south we arrived at Seven Sisters Country Park at about 11:30am. In the book of "Perfect Landscape Photography", this isn't exactly the most favour time of day for landscape photography. But at least I was out and in the fresh air, Billingham over my shoulder and Gitzo in my hand. Today wasn't about capturing the most amazing image, it was about being outside in the countryside again and becoming reacquainted with using my DSLR in the field. I had only really been using the Nikon for product photography over the last couple of months.
We left the car in South Barn carpark and headed south towards the coast along a well marked footpath. It wasn't long before we reached the cliff edge. There was a metal staircase giving access to the rocky beach below. Once on the beach i looked around for a composition, I wanted to capture the busyness of the beach with all of the rocks and boulders. Once I was relatively happy what I was seeing through the viewfinder of the camera I set up the Gitzo, attacked the camera to the ball-head. I composed, focused and tripped the shutter using the 2 second timer. I used a polariser to increase the depth of the blue sky. The result is the image above. Once I was happy I captured the shot I continued to wlak around the beach towards Cuckmere Haven. Pausing to capture another image. This time looking out across the bay toward the Seven Sisters, in the foreground was a large rock pool. I switched lens to the 24-70mm and after a brief struggle with removing the polariser from the 16-35mm I attached it to the front of the 24-70mm. The polariser helped to reduce the glare on the the surface of the pool. I attached this combination back on the ball-head on the Gitzo. I captured a couple of images. This image is at the top of the page.
Continuing around the base of the cliffs to Cuckmere Haven there were some interesting groynes on the beach, they were tall and the wood they were constructed from rotten from the constant battering from the salted sea water. The blue/grey sky behind gave a great backdrop. Here though I only grabbed a handheld shot with the 24-70mm f2.8, I quite liked the resulting image with the groynes creating a leading line into the image and the awesome textured patches of pebbles and rocks laying on the coarse sand of the beach. While taking a short rest sitting on a far too comfortable rock, I looked out towards the sea. The groynes disappeared into the sea in a more familiar fashion, the rocks in the foreground were covered with a vibrant green seaweed. I wanted to capture this image, so I set up the Gitzo attached the Nikon to the ball-head and framed the shot. The light had become a little flat now but i captured the image anyway. I did a little post edit cloning to remove a very angular rock from the centre of the frame, which just didn't fit in with all the other rocks.
