Beachy Head

It was October 2020. Covid restrictions were easing enough for people to be able to go out when they wanted, but you still had to keep your distance and wear face masks. The vaccine wasn’t a thing yet. Sometimes just for some isolated fresh air I’d get in my car and drive. I loved to do that long before Covid, of course. This time, however, was different. I was a few months away from the birth of my child, and I knew that in the near future I’d be trading my sporty Toyota GT86 for something a bit more practical for parenthood (but that also, helpfully, had a bigger engine and more horsepower, such is the way of things). So I wanted to just go for a drive, with no real plan of where I’d end up.

I drove for an hour. I just headed for the coast and then went eastwards to see where I ended up.

Where I ended up was at Beachy Head.

Beachy Head is known for two things. One is being a notorious suicide spot, and the other is its lighthouse.

So with it being a nice day, and me wanting to actually spend some time by the coast for once, I took some time to take some pictures.

I wasn’t there taking photographs for long before a lifeboat came past.

This gave a quick opportunity to photograph the lighthouse with the lifeboat going behind it.

I quickly shifted focus to the lifeboat whilst it was going past, and switched to my 70-300mm telephoto to get a better view.

Despite not wanting to miss the boat, as it were, I used the opportunity to get some closeups of the lighthouse.

Even at full zoom, the lifeboat was a bit small in the frame. Still, I got some decent shots of the wash from the boat, and the lovely contrast between the blue sea and the orange livery of the boat (which is deliberate, in order to make them easier to see).

In situations like this it’s always hard to pick a favourite shot, because the spray from the boat is so random, and it’s very subjective as so what is the most aesthetically pleasing, so here’s a few as the boat powered by.

With the lifeboat passed, I returned my attention to the lighthouse. I took another relative closeup, albeit a bit wider than the last shot. I did, however, tweak the colours a bit to try to make the red and the blue pop more. It might be getting a bit close to being overdone, but that’s another subjective opinion – a few people I asked preferred it like this.

I switched back to my standard zoom lens to take some wide angle shots that included the cliffs.

Quite unexpectedly, given how rusty I was (and indeed still am) at photography, which usually leads to forgetting all of the right techniques and methods, I had the wherewithal to close the aperture back up to f/8, which is a more typical aperture for landscapes, and also a very simple thing that I often forget.

This isn’t the only lighthouse at Beachy Head. In the other direction is the old lighthouse, that was replaced by the red stripy one in the early 1900s (I say with absolute confidence like I didn’t just look that up on Wikipedia). I took a shot back towards the old lighthouse, and you could still see the lifeboat heading towards the horizon.

I wandered about some more, and then ultimately got a bit cold and got in the car to head home, and Beachy Head has become another of those places I’ve only ever visited once, briefly, and so should really go back to.