Disaster at Flambourough

Well its been a fun few days.

We decided to take a family holiday to the Yorkshire coast at Flamborough head. It is an area I visited about 13 years ago and I remember from then that there was some stunning coastline. As a bonus not far away was Bempton Cliffs, which is probably the best mainland seabird colony in England.

While the main intention was a family break and we would also have a few friends with us for a couple of days, I also hoped I would be able to sneak off and take a few photos in between the normal family holiday stuff.

One plan was to take pictures of the Gannet colony's at Bempton and anything else that caught my eye.

With that in mind I took my 150-600 Tamron.

Since I purchased this lens, it hasn't been overused much. After all it's a bit of a lump and therefore not exactly the kind of lens you just carry around. As a consequence, the opportunities to use it has been limited. However Bempton offered some great possibilities. Gannets are large colourful birds and tend to float above the cliffs giving you a good chance to get pictures of them in flight. They are also colourful and distinctive meaning that combined with the extra reach of the lens I hoped to get good images.

I also wanted to try and take some long exposure stuff on the shore. Flamborough is a great place for this sort of stuff, but for some reason is often overlooked with people heading further north to Bamburgh or Dorset.

Flamborough has 3 great chalk coves called landings where the sea has eaten out natural bays giving a pebbly braches surrounded by chalk cliffs. The plan was to get out around dawn, just as the sun rose and take some long exposures using my wide angle and a ND filter. The low light at that time I hoped would allow good long exposure.

In the past, these plans often came to naught, but this time the weather was just right, with a bit of cloud making the sky interesting, so at 5 a.m. I crept out the tent and drove off . I wasn't sure at first where initially  to go to. Flamborough  has a great lighthouse and one thought was to take an image of that with the low sun behind it, but I decided to initially to go to north landing.

When I got there I realised I made the right choice. Access was relatively easy and it had a number of crabing boats pulled up which created some interesting shots. I had my DSLR on a tripod with a wide angle and the ND filter which gave a exposure time of 62 seconds as calculated by the app on my phone. I also has my A6000 around my neck to take other shots if i saw anything else of interest.

The 1st shots were hopeful, but I felt I needed to be closer to the sea to get a better milky water effect. So I plonked the tripod closer to shoreline near some pebbles for foreground interest. The light was also getting better so i pulled my phone out to recalculated the exposure tiem.

and that is when it happened...

The tide was coming in at the time and was moving faster than I expected. When i looked up from my phone I realised the water was going to come up to my tripod and me. It was at this point I panicked.  Instead of just standing up and letting my feet get wet, I grabbed at my tripod, where I promptly slipped going down into the surf. My phone which was in my right hand was submerged and my A6000 which was around my neck also got dunked.

After scrabbling up the beach, shoes and trousers soaked and surveyed the damage. Initially the phone looked OK, but after a while shutdown and would not restart. More annoyingly the A6000 also refused to turn on. I removed the battery (couldn't do that on the phone unfortunately ), and went back to the campsite and tried my best to dry both out. (I also managed to trip up over a low wall grazing my knee and producing a good bruise)

Unfortunately it appears that despite the short amount of dunking time, both  the phone and the camera are now dead. The phone needed replacing anyway, but the camera is a real bummer and i am still kicking myself how it happened. Fortunately the images were OK, but that is only a small comfort.

As for the rest of the holiday, well I did manage to take some pictures at Bempton and learned that bird in flight photos are really tough, even gannets. In truth what you need is a lot of time, a large memory card to store all the failed images you will get and a fast focusing camera. However considering I only had half a day, generally I was happy with some of the results.

Unfortunately we had to cut the holiday short, due to high winds threatening to damage the tent. Then we managed to flatten the car battery with the fridge plugged in.

So all in all things could of gone better.

Things I learnt

1. Watch out if the tide is coming in
2. Tripods can stand immersion in sea water, cameras (and phones) generally can't
3. If you can, go in pairs to take coastal images so you can lokk out for each other
4. Treat the sea with respect.

Still after all that I would still like to go back to Flamborough one day, just to take some more images. For some reason it tends to be overlooked but in the right weather has provides some great opportunities for photography, especially at dawn when the sun rises in the east.