We’ve had stormy weather of late and not much cold so this was a surprising find a couple of days ago and neatly mirrors my last post of 2013. The shot has not been doctored in photoshop aside from cropping and the colours originate from what was in front of my car – garage door, plants and some sky but they help turn it into an amazing landscape. So here’s to 2014…
©Greshoff
Here is one windscreen’s worth of frost, before I destroyed it! Nature is always amazing.
Happy Christmas
Frost Windscreen
We had a couple of days on the beach in France (it was my birthday) and as the tide gradually came in I was reminded about just how fantastically dynamic the sea is – constantly moving and changing. Being on the sea is one of the things I love about sailing and even though we weren’t sailing this week-end, watching the waves wash up and break against the seawall was almost as good. This series was done in the space of about 30 seconds in between chatting and the occasional glass of wine:
I spent a couple of days at Sheerness a while back and had a great session on board Svitzer Victory with Captain Steven Goodyear and Chief Engineer Shawn Scutts. These are singular vessels with only one function and everything is geared to performing that function. At 34m LOA it is not a very large boat but it’s with it’s two 4894bhp engines it is certainly up to the job. The view from the command station is just that – commanding – with pretty much every part of the boat visible and most of the controls, it seemed to me, were to do with power management.
Steven Goodyear though, was a quiet unassuming guy who oozed calm and confidence, just the kind of guy you would hope and expect to be in charge of a very powerful machine!
SeaPeople Project, Steve Goodyear, Svitzer Victory, Sheerness, Port of London
SeaPeople Project, Shawn Scutts, Svitzer Victory, Sheerness, Port of London
I’ve got a day in today, costings, emails, accounts, waiting for FedEx, packing up DVD’s and sorting stuff out in general. I am also looking at the possibility of another small exhibition. Interest has been expressed in the Coast Structure series so I’ve been revisiting them to see if there is anything there I might want to show. Whilst on my hard-drive travels I came across this shot that I had rejected originally because it didn’t fulfil the criteria I was after at the time but looking at it 3 or 4 years later, it is quite a nice pic in a pictorial sort of way.
Sea and rocks off the south coast of Kent
Back to some portraits for a change…
Quite early on in the SeaPeople Project, I visited the RNLI base at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey where I photographed a number of the volunteers. They are a great bunch of guys and I had a fantastic time shooting them. They also treated me to a very speedy spin in their Trent Class lifeboat, which was somewhat quicker than the little 8m yacht I sailed at the time. (See their site for more info: http://www.sheernesslifeboats.org.uk/lifeboats.htm)
The first portrait is Stuart Smith, a crew member aboard “George and Ivy Swanson”
Stuart Smith, RNLI Sheerness
Next up is Andy Mathews who is crew and mechanic:
Andy Mathews, RNLI Sheerness
and Deputy Second Cox, Paul Sands:
Paul Sands – RNLI Sheerness
and finally to finish off, a group shot done whilst blasting around on the Medway!
Another one from SeaPeople:
Andy is a fisherman and has been one most of his life. He sails out of Whitstable Harbour on the Kent coast just along from Faversham and is one of the few fisherman still plying his trade from that port. This portrait was shot in the cabin of his vessel “Misty” which to an outsiders eye looks so full of marine stuff it is hard to see how it can function as the nerve centre of his boat but Andy knows exactly where everything is and I think would not have it any other way.
So different again and still wonderful.
I revisited the lake featured yesterday a day later, after a long period of gentle but non-stop snow and discovered an altogether more subtle environment. The crisp, contrasty and well defined round holes were now a much more interesting series of greys and swirling shapes – with foot prints.
I also stopped to look at the parts that were not yet frozen which were fascinating too, in an entirely different way.
On Saturday whilst out for a walk along the Stour River we came across some remarkable snow patterns on the lakes. I can only guess that they were caused by a timely combination of ice, light snow and wind but however they happened they were wonderful to see and in 10 years of walking I had never come across anything similar before.
So well worth a photographic visit (with ladder) – and being late for lunch for!
The first image is a rough cut composite showing pretty much the whole lake and images following are more considered views.
Frozen Lake
And this last pic was taken by my brother of me in action up the ladder, sporting a fetching pair of orange pants!
