Like many of you I’m starting to get itchy feet. 2020 was the first year that I did not get in a plane in a long while and 2021 has started off looking like travel will be limited this year too.
That got me thinking about all the places I would like to visit. So this is the first of what I’m calling ‘virtual photo tours’ where we explore some of the places I want to visit and highlight who might be good companions for our trips. For our first photo tour I wanted to go ‘home’ and explore with a camera places from my past.
First up Yorkshire. I grew up in a very flat part of Yorkshire, on the border of the old East and West Ridings. Paul Hart’s images of The Fens, such as the one above, could have been taken in this area rather than in East Anglia. They really remind me of foggy Sunday mornings driving around to play football against the neighboring village team.
The river Don flows through the village I grew up in. Growing up I heard stories of epic flooding in the local area. Those times seem to have returned as you can see in the footage below.
Let’s head out to the Yorkshire Coast next and take a drive up from Filey to Robin Hood’s Bay, Whitby and finally to Staithes.
I spent all my summers at the beach in Filey and I’m looking forward to returning with my camera soon. My uncles used to keep their fishing boat just to the left of the little hut in the image below.
As places do, Filey has changed a lot since I was a kid. The fishing boats on cobble landing are essentially gone and there is talk of closing the lifeboat station. What a travesty.
The Brigg – the land that juts out into the sea in the image above has lots of possibilities. You have to be careful though – the tide comes in quick and it’s easy to get cut off.
After a stop in Robin Hood’s Bay lets stop at Whitby. I’ve only been to Whitby a few times. It’s famous as the place where Captain Cook learned seamanship and connections with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s also the last stop on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. When I think of Whitby I think of the breakwaters that guard the entrance of the harbor shown in the image below.
Adam Karnacz of First Man Photography gives a great tour of the sights of Whitby in his video below and also a tutorial of long exposure seascapes too!
On to Staithes! I’ve never been to Staithes and only know it from the Joe Cornish images of the harbor below. I can wait to visit, especially at different times of year. What a difference a coating of snow makes!
Listen to Joe talk about the image at the top and how he thinks about preparing the image for print in the video below.
Perhaps we could get Joe Cornish or Adam Karnacz to join us for our coastal adventure or better yet the two of them together they clearly have great chemistry in the video below.
For the final leg of our nostalgia edition photo tour I want to visit Snowdonia. More about that next time.
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