Bossiney Haven and Benoath Cove

iPhone AutoStitch made on location

 Benoath Cove is tucked around a headland from it's main access at Bossiney Haven. It's beach is usually under the waves, but on a low spring tide rocky cave pierced cliffs are like heaven to me! I was there in mid-March on one of the lowest tides of the year which gave me four hours to explore and photograph. This blog post represents my sketchbook or work-in-progress as I haven't made a finished image at the time of posting; that will have to wait until a rainy day. However my working practice includes making iPhone photo-constructions on location and I like to process my RAW images asap and then make quick, automated, photomerges from the jpegs produced.

Quick automated photomerge in Photoshop CC 2015. Making a sketch like this helps me to progress the image later on; I'm immediately wanting to lengthen the exposure of many of the darker frames to expand the overall tonal range and I also need to delicately bring out the water drips which give a sense of both the dampness and of time passing.

Old path to Benoath Cove

Signal Cave iPhone AutoStitch

I timed my visit to Benoath so that I was there two hours before low tide and took the less used, old path, down to the beach. This path isn't way-marked and I wouldn't recommend it; the first part was covered in brambles which are only bearable in the winter when they've died back and heavy jeans are worn, the second part, the decent down the cliff, is treacherous as most of it is on a steep ledge with only a rail to keep you from plunging to the beach. The last section has no handrail and just an old fishing rope, tied to the end of the rail, to help you over the steep, wet, smooth, slippery rocks onto to equally difficult beach below. I had been on the beach in the past but it was disorientating with the sea still so far in, so it took a few minutes of clambering up and down the so far accessible rocky beach, before I could find the cave I was looking for. I refer to this cave as Signal Cave because you can actually make a mobile phone call inside. I even received a text right at the very back which has to be at least 30 metre from the opening.
My reason for getting into the cave as soon as possible after the receding tide was aesthetic, the wet walls and dripping ceiling make for a far more dramatic image. This particular cave is my current favourite and I could easily have spent all four hours here, as it has three distinct entrances which all join together far into the the cliff. It takes me approximately an hour to shoot the frames for a single constructed photograph so four hours was never going to be enough on this beach as it was visually so generous.

iPhone AutoStitch

 It takes me approximately an hour to shoot the frames for a single constructed photograph so four hours was never going to be enough on this beach as it was visually so generous. These last two iPhone AutoStich images will have to wait to photographed properly! The first I entered with only a few minutes before low tide, which was lapping at it's mouth, and I had to force myself to leave it for another day (I know how obsessive I can be to perfect the image, I knew I would be so absorbed in my work that time would disappear and I could be cut off, inside the cave!). 

iPhone AutoStitch

Photographic Workshops in Devon, Spring 2016
Digital Camera Skills - 10am-5pm £50
A practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. Numbers limited to a hand-full. I also offer it on a 1:1 basis for ½ a day for £75
Course Description pdf
Wednesday 23rd March in Bideford Click to Book

Family Photo Workshop - get to know your camera - £30 per adult (maximum 2 accompanied children free)
A practical workshop to get to know your camera better. You'll learn about shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash and setting your camera up for optimum quality. This is a 3 hours contact time with 2 hours in the middle for taking photographs and having lunch.
Thursday 31th March in Bideford, (10am-3pm) Click to Book

iPhoneography Workshop - £25
A practical workshop to learn how to use your iPhone's camera to take professional looking photographs and enhance those images on the go. Suitable for anyone with an iPhone. You will need to install a few cheap photo apps in advance which I'll advise on when booking!
Wednesday 16th March in Barnstaple (9.30am-12.30pm) Click to Book

The Mouse Hole, Mousehole, Cornwall

Finished constructed photograph of Mouse Hole 2014

I first got to know about the Mouse Hole Cave when researching the Beaford Old Archive in 2009 Looking for an image to use in an early Ghost Card for an exhibition I had been commissioned to make work for. I had known Mousehole, the village, pronounced ‘mowsull’ since childhood holidays in Cornwall; it had the quaint harbour and lots of cats. I had never questioned it’s name or come across the footpath which left the village on the giveaway Cave Lane. I discovered it for myself for the first time in June 2010. It had struck me as a man-made cave, some kind of mine, which hadn’t seen the sea for a number of years.

Francis Frith 1908

The old footpath sign carried a fitting scratched statement ‘Not To Beach’; and that had been all I needed to find this place. Its interior was very dry with evidence of youthful parties and a lush green fern covered entrance. I made some photographs with the intention of stitching them together in the winter, but those images stayed unstitched until now! Maybe I had felt at the time that the resulting image in my minds-eye wasn’t going to fit in with the sea cave images I was working on As well as the image in the Beaford Archive, collected by James Ravilious, I found that other photographers had documented it in the past. Francis Frith had been here in 1908 and 1927. I’m sure there were also Victorian and Edwardian photographers also making their way to this place when there was a metal ladder set in the cliff and the path was accessible without almost crawling through the undergrowth. 

Francis Frith 1908

Francis Frith 1927

This would have been a major attraction to the tourists back then and the trail from village to cave would have even been accessible to ladies and gentlemen in their flowing dresses and suits. My visit to the Mouse Hole in April 2014 was after a winter of record high rainfall and gale after gale coming in from the south west. This cave would have taken the full force of the weather fronts and huge waves. The storms had cleansed Mouse Hole from years of growth from land based plants and of the litter and detritus left from years of neglect from its visitors and from the high tides which had also left their mark. This was a profoundly different cave than the one seen four years earlier, but I expect this is a continual cycle, probably also witnessed by Frith and other returning pilgrims back then.

April is also a time for seabirds to nest and this time the entrance way was alive with kittiwakes leaving and returning to their precipitous homes. This with the blue sky was a major part of my memory of the cave in 2014, whereas the white overcast sky of 2010 had helped me concentrate on its tropical entrance. Time was against me as I was constricted to public transport to get me back from Penzance to St Ives, and this after the hike back into town; but sometimes this can focus the mind. The resulting image is a combination of iPhone and Olympus Pen. The image was quickly made with my iPhone including 17 frames of the entrance focusing of the kittiwakes in flight. The interior of the cave was then quickly made with the micro 4/3rds camera mounted on a tripod. Speed was also important here because the ceiling was continually dripping and it was only luck that all of the frames were made without a splat of water on the UV filter. Fortunately this cave is so large, tall and wide mouthed, that interior lighting was almost even, there being 1 stop exposure difference between the entrance and the ring of images deeper into the cavern. And only 2 stops difference from the outside exposure of sea, sky and birds.

Finished constructed photograph of Mouse Hole 2010

Post processing was started almost immediately with an iPhone image created in the AutoStich app; but it was clear from the start that it would be a difficult image to stitch. The iPhone frames were stitched together in Photoshop later in the day and a selection of the ‘bird’ frames were combined to reinforce my memory of the place. The camera frames were stitched a couple of days later and then the two formats were combined together to make a finished image that can be printed up to 1 metre squared.
With this new image I went in search of the folder containing all of the photographs from the Cornwall trip in 2010. These images made on my Olympus dslr were combined in a similar way and make an image of a similar size. But comparable in so many other ways which makes both images more interesting and a great record of this wonderful place.

Stitched iPhone images of Mouse Hole 2014

Reception and Presentation

Invite wonderfully designed by Kitty Dough

This was always going to be an evening of exultation and intrepidation I had every confidence in Kitty Dough, Larry Warner the exhibits curator and all of the staff and volunteers at the Aquarium; I just had to make sure I didn't mess it up!

I had made a practice run of the presentation a few days earlier. This was taking place in the perfect location. I was to share the room with a 285,000-gallon shark tank ''Graveyard of the Atlantic'' that's 35-foot long and 14 feet tall. As well as the sharks, and numerous smaller fish which sometimes become dinner, the  tank holds a 1/3 scale replica of the USS Monitor, which lies just off Cape Hatteras at a depth of 210 feet. The room is essentially lit by the dull blue glow coming through the 5.5 inch thick acrylic window of the tank. The projector screen seemed massive, like a small cinema, and combined with the powerful projector made my images look awesome. I spent a lot of time getting used to a wireless mouse because I was using Adobe bridge for the slideshow which enabled me to use big files and zoom right into the images.

Meeting and greeting was at 6pm around the exhibition cabinets. This helped to guage the interest level and questions my audience might have; and calmed my nerves. There was a great spread of Anglo/American food available that had either been bought from the next State that likes to call itself a commonwealth, or homemade like the scones.

7pm was the presentation. Kitty introduced me to the audience numbering 50+. The talk was far more than my photographs, although there was a fascination in the way I construct my images from as many as 100 seperately taken frames. This exhibition, to me, had always been about introducing Manteo to it's twin town through it's surrounding coast, river and, originally shared, history. Using old maps, the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty map and Richard Larn's shipwreck map, I took my audience on a journey from Marsland Mouth on the border with Cornwall, along the Hartland coast, across Bideford Bay, up the Torridge into Bideford, around Saunton Sands to Baggy Point, along to Briery Cave at Watermouth, into Combe Martin and it's caves which were mines; and finished off on the Exmoor coast at Wringapeak, near to the Somerset border.

It was supposed to be a half hour presentation and in practice it had been 45 minutes to I had vowed to cut it shorter. But, when I get excited I can't stop; so it was more like 50 minutes, plus questions which were many. Nobody seemed to mind the length except perhaps my ever supportive wife Sadie who had been gesticulating 'cut it' and 'wind it up' but I hadn't noticed! Sadie is also credited for all of these photographs.