This weekend I drove for four hours to spend time in Norfolk with my Cameras.I woke up at five on Saturday morning and rather than turn over and go back to sleep I dressed and walked down on to Cromer Beach just as the sun was starting to rise. I set up my Camera and Tripod and took some photographs and then returned to my room to await breakfast.
Once I had eaten I was back in car and driving into the Norfolk Broads. I drove the length of the main road twice as over the next eight hours I tilted at windmills with my Camera. At the end of the day I had captured ten different scenes on both film and digital and walked more than usual for me.
Three days later I consider the trip more recognisance than a definitive record of the Broads. Over the coming months I will now seek to find a couple of days when I can return and better capture what I saw over the weekend. As someone who enjoys landscape photography I am obsessive or realistic in the fact that the conditions were not optimum?
My actions over the weekend were outside what I do normally. I spent less time in bed and was more responsive to the environment that I would be at "home". The lack of "local" knowledge drove me to explore and question more. However the lack of time in some ways saw me rushed as I sought to tick off views from some mental shortlist. My photo essay of Hitchin Lavender Farm over six weeks this summer has show the benefit of revisiting a space to record a scene. So was I wrong to think that the Norfolk Broads was something that could be crossed off after a single visit?
