I’ve recently spent a week on a family holiday, staying just outside Embleton in Northumberland. The last time I visited the area was around 4 years ago and you can see the images from that trip in a previous blog post here.
That previous visit had a mix of fairly traditional landscape images and more abstract impressions which was a reasonable reflection of my style at the time. I had some specific evenings taking the camera out for photography and was treated to decent weather with some nice evening light.
Since then I think my approach has certainly changed, I’ve gone back to favouring a slightly darker aesthetic and am shooting a lot of mono squares as well as less ICM. I’m also in a bit of a lull at the moment with limited enthusiasm or inspiration for photography. The last proper trip out with my camera was back in November, 6 months ago.
The first image I took on this trip was with my phone, I was down on the beach with the family and the weather started coming in. I loved the look of some of the old chalets on the dunes and this one sat perfectly against the dramatic sky. Not long after this we left the beach, freezing kids in tow, before the heavens opened.
I’ve stopped taking my proper camera on trips out with the family as I just find it too much to juggle with young kids and difficult to concentrate on being creative. So this was very much a case of the best camera being the one that you have with you. It’s very rare that I try to take any ‘serious’ photos with my phone, mostly just record shots, but I enjoyed the process of this, editing it in Lightroom Mobile and then finishing off on the laptop.
In the rest of the week I only had one evening when I went down to the beach by myself and spent some proper time out with the camera. The weather was very flat with pretty dull skies and what light there is in the evenings was in the wrong direction to hit the dunes.
I decided to try and take a series of cohesively styled images, a couple including the landmark of Dunstanburgh castle, but more focusing on the dunes and chalets building off the phone image from a couple of days before. You can see the results below, including a black and white conversion of the phone image above to fit in with the set.
