Cley Windmill

Cley Windmill

The windmill at Cley-Next-The-Sea on the North Norfolk Coast is a well known landmark and it attracts many visitors both from the U.K. and further afield. This image was taken just as three weeks of restoration work at the windmill were completed. During this time both the fantail and the four sails were either fully restored or replaced altogether. Along with my girlfriend I was asked to document the work so that the owners and future visitors could see exactly what had been achieved during the three weeks of restoration. I will be writing a post on this shortly but in the meantime you may like to read this.  http://brettgardnerphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/cley-windmill.html

Before the sometimes brutal coastal weather started to batter the windmill once again, I decided to take a couple of images that would hopefully show it at its best. I had already scouted the location and decided on the above composition, the little dyke acting as a great lead in line, the tall yellowy brown reeds further accentuating this. I waited patiently for about 45 minutes, camera in position, cable release attached, hoping that the sun would explode from behind the low blanket of cloud that had rolled in not half an hour beforehand. Just as I thought all was lost out it came, blazing light across the field, hitting the side of the windmill and lighting the low clouds, turning them a lovely orange colour.

I always think about the shot long before I set it up and I knew that this one would present a slightly different challenge to the other landscape images I've taken recently. I normally use ND grad filters to balance the lighter sky with the darker foreground but in this instance I didn't feel that was possible. Doing so would almost certainly mean cutting through the windmill making it artificially darker than it looked to the eye. The only way round this was to capture several exposures of the same composition and blend them together in Photoshop later. The dynamic range across the image wasn't as great as first expected so I only needed to combine two images to achieve the desired effect. The image has turned out just as I had imagined, showing the windmill at its absolute best. I'm hoping that it will be a good seller in the future once it's finally printed, mounted and framed. Fingers crossed....