Corfe Castle and Kimmeridge Bay

At some point in the past month we'd agreed to meet up with friends and head down to Dorset for some early dawn land and seascapes. With sunrise around 7am, there was no option but to load up the coffee maker, set the alarm for 03:40 and try and grab a few hours sleep before an 04:30 departure. In a remarkably short time we'd sped down the A3 and through The New Forest to arrive, according to Here Maps, at Corfe Castle in a faint pre-dawn glow. It was only as we walked through the woods and headed up the hill that the sky started to brighten noticeably and we were able to start trying to spot the potential vantage points that gave a view of the castle and included the adjacent town and hills beyond.

I'd done some pre-shoot investigation with the The Photographers Ephemeris and knew roughly where I wanted to be, but there was still some up-the-hill, no, back-down-a-bit, maybe-over-there-then hiking through the frosty bracken and brambles as I got the castle and surroundings into a composition that I liked. Then it was a case of metering and balancing the exposures values for the land and rapidly brightening sky, to make sure I had the right combination of my new Lee filters in place.

I've never been to Corfe Castle before so I really was capturing images that I'd never seen before as huge castle ruins were slowly revealed by the rising sun. Also, I've been shooting a lot of people and events recently and it really did take a few shots before I made the mental switch to calm down, stop looking for shot/angle/filter and just enjoy being out capturing and creating images of what turned out to be the most beautiful time of day.

With the sun fully up, and the sky already started to show signs of an accurate weather forecast, we jumped back in the car to meet up with the remainder of our group down at Kimmeridge Bay. I've never been to Kimmeridge Bay before either, but there are more than a few photos of it online, so I had a pretty good idea of what it looks like. However, our group scheduling was only able to arrange a time when we could all commit to the early rise, there was nothing we could do about the times of the tides. So it was a very different view that greeted us as we walked to the cliff edge. The highest tide of the year was in. All the way in. All that was above water was the pillbox, which was handy, because it's a perfect feature in what was crying out to be a long exposure seascape.

The waves were just big enough to get a decent splash every now and again too, so I decided to lose the ND filter, switch from 24-70 to 70-200, and bring the shutter speed up enough to get an action shot from the same vantage point.

And this was all before 10am on a Sunday. So it was definitely now time for 2nd breakfast, Clavells Restaurant was on hand in the village to provide 4 hearty fry-ups and a pot of tea to get us warmed up and ready to head back out into the now definitely-getting-worse-fast weather. We decided to check out the slip way and waterfall on the eastern corner of the bay as we could park close while we kept an eye on a suspicious looking wall of grey that had appeared out at sea.

This was a good plan, barely twenty minutes later that soggy wall of grey blew inland and the wind and side-ways rain forced us to call it a day. But, by then we'd been up for eight hours, I'd seen two new places, shot a few hundred frames and had two breakfasts. All in all, not bad for a Sunday morning ;)