I do enjoy a good workshop, and I thoroughly recommend that regardless of how long people have been taking photographs they go on the occasional one to stretch the photographic muscles. We can become incredibly complacent in our ways of seeing things and methods of working. We can arrive at a location, unpack all the kit as fast as possible and then spend the day shooting but not necessarily seeing. Not just seeing but also feeling, hearing, becoming at one with the location.

And so this is how I (actually, we, as I wasn’t going to get away with going on this just by myself), ended up on a very desolate stretch of the Suffolk coast at 7am on a February morning looking out at a grey sky sitting above a grey North Sea. Sunrise was nominally at 07:17 but it seemed that daylight was more reluctant to get out of its bed than we had been ours an hour or so earlier. The workshop was being run by Paul Sanders (https://www.discoverstill.com), who we’ve known for a few years now. Paul’s ‘method’ is to slow things right down. Don’t get the camera and barrage of lenses out; no, go for a walk, take a note book, watch what’s happening. What’s beneath your feet? What can you hear? How do you feel? Write a poem if you want. Look at the land, the sea, the sky. Slow down.
Now try and capture those feelings in a photograph.

Look at the textures. Encapsulate the day in three photographs. Work with these key words. Throw a frisbee and work with where it lands (we didn’t - no-one had a frisbee). It’s challenging and liberating at the same time. And most importantly - if you don’t manage to get a photograph does it really matter?

We got photos. We got loads of photos. We got loads of photos of the same things because we worked a subject to get the best out of it, because we waited for the right wave to break on a piece of shoreline, because we tried to relate to our subject and give it our focus.

A great day was had by all of us on the workshop. It was exhausting - eleven hours of dragging kit up and down the shingle dunes, around the pools and along the shoreline at Shingle Street does take it out of you - but quite rewarding.

All photographs taken with a Fujifilm GFX50Sii with Fujifilm GF23mm, 35-70mm, and 45-100mm lenses and a Minolta MD Rokkor 28mm lens