The Kynance Conundrum - a photo on Flickriver

            According to the folders in the cloud, I don’t come here that often.  It doesn’t feel as if almost three years have passed since I persuaded Ali to pose on the ridge in front of the stacks while I took a shot of her that lives on the sitting room wall, and our phones mysteriously advanced into the future by a single hour as we unexpectedly entered the continental zone.  Where do the years go?  They’re racing by quicker than ever now.  And where did the summer go too for that matter?  At least the car park isn’t rammed here every day now, although the mercury has nose dived in spectacular fashion over the last few days.  And most of all, why do I always find this location so difficult to photograph?  Compositionally speaking, I’m forever unsatisfied here.  This time I started off too high, then dropped down to just above the water, before finally resting here, the halfway house where I nearly always stop.  The YouTube leviathans were here a couple of autumns ago too - trying completely different angles at sunrise and I didn’t like any of their shots at all.  The shapes that make this group of sea stacks so definitive and interesting were completely lost in shooting them from where they were standing - well in my opinion they were anyway.  Sorry Mads and Nigel.  Sometimes the bleedin’ obvious is bleedin’ obvious for a good reason.

We’d been back to the May Tree for fish and chips at bargain afternoon prices, this time in the van, before heading down the Lizard Peninsula.  It’s not my favourite drive in the world.  The Redruth to Helston road is narrow and twisting through a handful of tiny hamlets and I usually seem to meet a bus or a big truck at one of the short stretches where the white lines in the middle disappear.  It’s always a relief when the Amos Pumps sign appears at one end, or the one telling me we’ve arrived at Pencoys when we’re heading back towards home.  I’ve never liked that road.  The one from Helston to Lizard Village is slightly better, apart from the two plunging chicanes, the first of them a gentle preparation for the rather more hairy second.  It was at the entrance to the second where we joined a stationary queue of traffic, just a hundred yards after the turn off that could have changed our plans and sent us to Gunwalloe instead.  Some cars began to turn around, but there was no way we were going to do that in a big red van.  For a quarter of an hour we sat on a blind bend, the engine switched off, wondering what on earth was going on.  Had somebody taken the chicane a bit too quickly and done a couple of cartwheels?  Ok, so the schools were still not due back for another couple of days, but it’s usually noticeably quieter once September kicks in.  “Just the newly weds and the nearly deads after August is over,” my daughter in law once quipped, having temporarily forgotten that I now sit firmly in the latter category.  

Now and again, a small number of cars would come from the opposite direction, the drivers looking pleased to have escaped from whatever was detaining everyone down there in the wooded depths.  Eventually we began to creep forward, soon learning what had made everything grind to a halt in the form of a combine harvester sized farm vehicle, inching its way past the southbound traffic in the narrow pass.  We pulled in our wing mirrors, scraped ourselves into the hedgerow and squeezed our eyes shut.  Somehow he got past without opening up a new side panel where we didn’t want one.  Harvest season.  There are few things more unnerving than a narrow escape from a forty tonne tin opener on the roads down here.  I was glad to get to Kynance unscathed, where I parked the van, pulled out the camping chairs and put the kettle on.  Ali promptly settled down for a snooze in the back of the van, and it wasn’t long before I squashed in alongside her.  The chairs were left outside, unemployed.  Only two days ago I’d been bodyboarding on a hot Sunday afternoon at Constantine Bay, but now the sky was grey and unrelenting, a steely breeze whipping in from somewhere east of here.  Instant Autumn right in front of us.  

At some point, before it got dark, I thought I might as well go and try something with the camera.  The possibility of a new angle sat in my mind, but as I moved along the path, the two stacks furthest out to sea began to separate like a pair of collapsed knees.  The highest point of the tiny archipelago sat below the horizon.  I didn’t like it from here - not today.  It was almost inevitable that I would end up in the same spot as usual, wondering how to get a tune out of this location without resorting to the bleedin’ obvious again.  Maybe I need more folders in the cloud and maybe I’ll begin to make sense of it one day, but for now the Kynance conundrum continues.  And even if I never find another composition here, this one is pleasing enough to bring me back from time to time when the summer months have passed.

Taken in: UK / England / Landewednack (show map)

Taken on: September 3, 2024

Tags:

kynance

Cove

Cornwall

Coast

ukcoast

British Coast

cornish coast

Kernow

Kernowfornia

long exposure

Water

water_shots

water_captures

Island

Sea

seascape

sea stack

sea stacks

Great Britain

Britain

England

Canon

english channel

Atlantic

Ocean

Kase « less

Sets appears in: • Kynance Cove

Groups appears in: • Cornwall • Outdoor Photographer Magazine (Unofficial) more » • Beautiful British Coast • "SEASCAPE" • Photography Week • Amateur Photographer Magazine • Flickr Social • Peak (Curated) • **Special Landscapes** • WONDERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN GENERAL.MARAVILLAS DE LA FOTOGRAFIA EN « less

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, f/11.0, 231 sec, 51mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Lens:	EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	231
Focal Length:	51mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Bulb
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 13.5.1 (Windows)
Show full info

Stats: 4,030 views / 79 comments

Link to this photo view:
Link to this photo large view: