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Penmon Point, on the island of Anglesey, North Wales, is one of the most beautiful, tranquil and uplifting places I know.
It takes me about an hour and a quarter to drive there from my home, so I can only really visit it during the couple of weeks either side of the longest day of the year. This is because I have to leave in time to drive back for work, which starts at eight a.m.!
So my photographic trips to Penmon start by getting up at 2.30a.m. to be on the road by 3.00a.m. That gets me to Penmon for 4.15a.m., which is just in time to get my camera gear set up and a nice composition framed in time for sunrise at 4.45a.m.
By 6.30a.m. I have to be back on the road again, driving to work, but that's not so bad because the light will have become too harsh for the sort of images I want to make by then.
As you can imagine, with this amount of effort involved just to get there and back, I want to make sure that conditions will be optimum. (Or as optimum as they'll get in North Wales - the weather's unpredicable to say the least!)
So the day before I'll have checked the weather forecast first of all, and also the state of the tide.
I always prefer to visit the coastline on a falling tide, as then I'll have freshly washed wet rocks or sand to use as a foreground in my images.
Penmon Point has a marvellous variety of weirdly eroded rock formations to include in compositions, and I'm only showing a few of the dozens of photos in my library that I have of this location.
So I'll keep going back to Penmon Point for as long as I can heave myself out of bed at crazy hours in the morning. Apart from the obvious pleasure of being able to photograph in such a wonderful location, I find that my visits there, in the early hours of a midsummer's dawn, give me a sense of peace and well being that I don't often find in the hurly burly of modern life.
Filename - lighthouse 04.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 17mm
Exposure - 1.6sec @ f16, ISO50
Location - Penmon Point, Anglesey
This image - 573x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Shutter speed chosen to slightly blur waves.
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