Beachy Head, the beginning

Uiler Costa
4 min readJul 23, 2014

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Beach Head — Eastbourne

Travelling fascinates us and is one of our higher priorities. We’ve already made several trips, but the style we used to follow, jumping from city to city in different countries at intervals of very few days, didn’t provide us enough time to understand the culture and the peculiarities of the places we visited.

After some trips like this, we decided to focus on only one country or region per travel, allocating at least thirty days of vacations to get the most out of each place (although we understand that just a month always seems to be not enough for discovering so many interesting places). In this new format, we would travel by car, as it would increase the flexibility and make day by day moves easier and, also, to give us a better feel about the paths and enjoy the scenery. By car it’s possible to stop by the roadside, take photos from an amazing view and return to the journey; by train or bus, we would be limited to programmed stops.

The first destination we’ve chosen was the UK, more precisely the three nations of Great Britain. We used as reference the book “Estradas da Inglaterra, Escócia e País de Gales” (Publifolha), an excellent guide for visiting the country through unconventional roads and reaching hidden places unknown for most tourists, but outstanding. We’ve also used the “Keyguide: Inglaterra, Escócia e País de Gales” (same publisher) when we needed additional references of the cities we’ve been. Those books, in their original version in English, are respectively “Back Roads Great Britain” (Dorkling Kindersley) and “Keyguide: Britain” (AA Publishing).

We prefer travelling in the summer, when days are much longer and the temperatures are comfortable. Our starting point was London Heathrow Airport, in August 2013. In the very first time, we rented a very small car, but brave and full of attitude. We left London and went to South Coast of England towards the county of East Sussex, to the beautiful limestone crags of Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, towering over the sea up to 162 m altitude as cliffs that create a fascinating composition.

The immensity of the sea, the contrast of the white colour of the rocks and the blue ocean and its reflection in the sky are really impressive. Being blessed in the first day of this trip with such a beautiful place was really a great privilege. The place is propitious for a day of rest, peace, contact with nature and reflection, in opposition to the frenetic movement of Heathrow and the roads that drove us to this paradise.

We arrived at Beachy Head around 11am. The sun was at the top and brightness was so intense that made that moment not the most suitable for shooting. A graduated ND filter and a polarizer would be worthy to make simple the process of balancing lights from the sky and soil and of saturating colours a bit. Even though I didn´t have them at that moment, I got some nice pictures without spending a lot of work in post-production.

Here is my tip: when you arrive in a stunning place, like this, don’t start shooting immediately. Dedicate at least ten minutes observing accurately the location, its characteristics and particularities and, most important, contemplating. After this experience, the result of the photography will be, undoubtedly, fantastic.

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