Ben Cooke’s elementography

In an image not amiss with the ‘summer’ weather of today, more cloudscapes from above Bennion Beach.

A stormy (albeit some what of a let down) looking afternoon above Bennion Beach renders the sky with a mixture of low and high cloud.

The earth holds her breath for one drawn out moment as day switches to night.

One the purest and simplest joys I take from photography is being able to control the amount of light that the medium (be it film or CCD) absorbs in order to dictate how the scene is represented.  As technology advances, there’s more and more ways of ensuring the ‘perfect’ photo.  For mine, though, it’s about illustrating the mood of the scene as I felt it in the image that I choose to represent that feeling.

Taken on the same evening as the shots over the last week, the mood of this image is in stark contrast to those, yet, it’s the same beach, same time of day, just a different approach and different set of rules for the light.

And that’s where the magic comes in!

A study of sun past the horizon lit clouds shows the contrast of those still in the sun’s path to those now overlooked.  I’ve always loved how if you glance at the view of an equally lit sky, your mind can almost believe that the clouds are mountains, or the sky some sort of sea on a shoreline of cloud.  Only through familiarity do we associate clouds with the sky.

After the dusk, the sentinels of the night prepare to light a path.

The last smoldering embers of clouds outline an ever darkening sky over the ocean at South Trigg beach.

Clouds illuminated by a sun on the brink of setting above South Trigg beach.  The sky begins to lose its clarity and this is replaced with a haze.

There’s something almost hypnotic about the relentless ebb and flow of the ocean with each passing wave.  As you quickly learn living on the western edge of a continent, no two sunsets are the same and the same goes for each break of the wave; the ocean is  sufficiently random that you never quite know where it will go, or what it will do next.  South Trigg has a protruding sandbar which ensures interesting patterns and breaks.

A well weathered advisory sign adorns the ocean’s edge at South Trigg Beach.  Those playing at home have possibly seen it on this site before, quite some time ago!