These two photos were taken at Crosby beach near Liverpool. My plan on going there was to take long exposure shotsof the wide open beach and sky offsetting the small figures of the Another Place installation by Antony Gormley. When I arrived at the beach after working near by I struggled to get out of the cardue to the 40 mile an hour winds, after making my way down to the beach I soon realised that any work involving long exposures and tripods was not going to work out well, so a change of plan was needed.
After walking on the beach to get ideas for compositions I noticed the light coloured sand started to be blown around by the wind, this left a vail of sand hovering about half a metre above the beach. The moving sands looked like aseries of low-level clouds around the figures so I decided to exploit the conditions and go for some shots that made the figures look like they werefloating in clouds or maybe just have their feet stuck in the bottom clouds. So after a couple of hours trying various locations, combination of figures, focal lengths and shutter speeds I left the beach red faced from wind/sand burn but pleased with a couple of shots.
Most of the shots taken were a 50-230mm lens on a fuji XE2 body. The figures are a long way apart from each other so a longish lens is needed to compress the distances. I had to take most shots at around 1/750 s to avoid camera shake due the high winds.