On first impressions this might not seem like a night time scene, but that is because of the technique used to capture the photo. Mark and I were staying a short walk down the beach at Alnmouth up in Northumberland and nearly every night we came back to photograph the boats. This was taken with my Sigma 10-20mm super wide-angle lens. I used my Nikon flash gun (hand held) to add more light to the boat (hence the shadow behind the rope) and the camera was obviously set to a very long exposure time. This is almost certainly one of my favourite boat photographs.

Old ruins like the above really interest me from a photographic point of view, this arch in particular. How it is still standing must be some sort of miracle or act of God! This is the Lindisfarne Priory, the building of the famous Benedictine monks who came to the island during the late 11th century.

My dad told me that Northumberland was one of the best areas in England for sunsets. Even though it is on the east coast (no sun setting on the sea here) it wasn’t until my second visit that I started to agree with him. This was taken in Alnmouth where there is a lot of opportunity for interesting landscapes at dawn and dusk. I could have exposed the above image to show the boat in the bottom left corner, but I wanted a dark, moody image showing the details in the cloud.

I had heard a lot of great things said about the photographic opportunities and picturesque scenes that awaited me on my first trip over to Holy Island (otherwise known as Lindsfarne). I was staying up in Northumberland in the North East of England for the second time last summer. However, on the first trip I never went across to this small island and nobody had mentioned these interesting boats to me before. Obviously this is recycling at its best and these old boats have now been converted into sheds for the fisherman.