Cley-next-the-sea

A very early start this morning, I was up at 4.45, showered, dressed in all my layers and left the house by 5.15 to drive to Wells-next-the-sea to meet up for the photography workshop run by Justin Minns. We went on to the beach and were hoping to see the sunrise which was not much of a show (see extra) but we spent nearly 3 hours there taking photographs. Justin was excellent and discussed things like compositions and the technical aspects of the photos and I learnt quite a bit from him. These beach huts are such a quintessentially British thing, a tiny shelter on the beach that you can sit in and make a cup of tea, but you cannot sleep in there, and for that that it will set you back about £80,000!!

We then drove into the town where we had an excellent breakfast at Bang in Wells. It was cold on the beach and we are all ready to warm up and get something to eat and the scrambled eggs with salmon and oat milk cappuccino certainly hit the spot. 

After breakfast we drove to Blakeney and photographed the boats and the creek (second extra). By now it was sunny and a much better day than expected, and it was not that cold if you were dressed correctly. Part of our five person group was a father and son and unfortunately the elderly dad, who had borrowed a tripod from Justin and was therefore not that familiar with it, thought he had secured his camera in the tripod when he hadn’t and his expensive camera slid off the tripod plate and fell into the water. Luckily you could just see the top of the camera strap floating at the top of the water so Justin fished it, but it was obviously not in working order. Not sure if it can be repaired and whether he has lost all his images on his card, it was so upsetting for him.

After Blakeney we drove to Cley-next-the-sea to photograph the windmill with the tall reeds swishing in the foreground. To our surprise we found that the reeds had been mostly cut down for thatching, but I liked the view of the cut down reeds and so this is my blip for today. This windmill is one of the iconic landmarks in Norfolk and it is where the singer James Blunt grew up, it has belonged to his family since the 1920's. 

We finished at about 1.30pm and I then drove back to Brancaster Staithe, packed up and we left to go home. We were expecting to be home at 5.30pm but we had a nightmare journey home, as the M25 was closed at J3 due to roadworks. I can only assume they were emergency roadworks as why would you close the busiest motorway in the UK during peak traffic times on a week day? It caused horrific traffic and we only got home at 7.40pm, so I was too late to go to camera club. It was a long and tiring journey as I was driving, as Gavin had some work zoom calls during the journey. After my very early start I am now very ready to go to bed!