The Trouble with Kynance - a photo on Flickriver

            Lee was looking confused. I suspect that he is looking back at my own bemused expression and thinking the same thing about me 99% of the time we’re out on a shoot together. The trouble with Kynance,” he declared while narrowing his eyes in the direction of the horizon “is that it’s a tricky old place to get a good shot. I had a look online before we came out and I couldn’t really see any that inspired me.” Of course he hadn’t seen yours. Yours was a beauty. “What about the one taken by [insert your name here] that I saw on Flickr this morning,” I protested. “That was a stunner. The mood, the light, the composition – I could feel the emotion in that shot.” He confessed he’d missed  that one.  He sends his apologies.

But he did have a point. Taking a shot at Kynance Cove did present some challenges. For a start, there were still plenty of people around. My daughter Nicky, who works at the National Trust car park on Saturdays told me that most of them appeared to be visitors from outside the county, despite the main holiday season having ended over a month ago. Once she’d finished her duties for the day she briefly joined the party before heading off in the direction of her mother’s nearby hot tub. Sadly, when the marriage came to an end all those years ago I lost out on the custody battle for the hot tub, so I suppose it's only inevitable that our now grown up children tend towards their mother when there's a social evening on offer.  All I can provide is a few puddles on the front drive and they'd have to queue up behind the resident goldfinches to take their turn at them in any case.  Those goldfinches love a good puddle.

Erm, where was I?  Back to the steady stream of visitors filling the path between the car park and the beach, stopping for selfies by the cliff edge in front of the all too agreeable backdrop and right in the middle of our compositions.  And then there was the focal point itself.  Stand here and the big yellowy rock at the back clashed with the headland behind it and spoiling the sense of separation.  From a higher vantage point we'd have been fine, but there wasn't one.  We either needed a stepladder, a pet giraffe, a drone or some serious experimentation with dangerous and fast acting growth hormone products. Stand there and the right hand side of the rocks disappeared into the headland in front of them.  I even tried the wide angle lens and concentrated on a clump of foreground granite.  I couldn't decide whether I liked it.  There were possibilities everywhere, but none of them were quite perfect.  I suppose that's photography.  The day we get a shot that we think is perfect, will there be any point in carrying on?  I'll continue to look for pictures that make me smile and bring back a feeling or a memory.  

We moved closer to the jumble of shapes in the sea, and then we moved away again.  A poodle raced to the cliff edge in an apparent suicide bid, stopping at the last nanosecond and staring at me questioningly as I gasped out in horror.  Its owners seemed not the slightest bit troubled.  Dogs might know when to stop, but can they also tell where the cliff edge is about to crumble and head south at an alarming rate?  A group of men scrambled down a near vertical slope so that they could launch stones into the sea far below them more easily.  I tried not to look.  It was all quite unsettling and it occurred to me that getting older makes you value the remaining years that bit more dearly.  After all, when you've done all the hard graft and you're soon to retire with some good years ahead to look forward to, why would you get too close to the edge of a cliff?

And so eventually, Lee having departed in the direction of food, I found myself over this vantage point again.  I've managed to take at least four different versions of it.  Between them, they have all of the elements that might have produced that perfect image.  In one of them the sky is filled from one side of the image to the other with sunbeams.  But I don't like the composition.  In another I managed to pull off a 30 second exposure despite the strong wind.  I liked the drama in the sea, but was less sure about the sky.  In the end I decided to post this one.  If I were telling this story half and hour later this evening, Such is my confusion, I might very well have shared one of the other ones with you instead.  But that's the joy of not finding that perfect image.  It means the quest to carry on trying continues.  The journey is always so much better than arriving anyway.

Taken in: UK / England / Landewednack (show map)

Taken on: October 3, 2020

Tags:

kynance

cove

Lizard

Kernow

Kernofornia

Kernowfornia

coast

British Coast

cornish coast

atla

rocks

sea

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sea stack

sea stacks

landscape photography

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Water

water_shots

water_captures

ocean

Atlantic

Britain

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majestic_earth « less

Sets appears in: • Kynance Cove • Sea Stacks and Islets more » • Lizard • Sea scapes and sunsets « less

Groups appears in: • Amateurs • Cornwall Flickr Users more » • Photography Week « less

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, f/11.0, 2.5 sec, 25mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Lens:	EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	2.5
Focal Length:	25mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	+2/3 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 21.2 (Windows)
Show full info

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