Playing with fire

I had been missing out on group photography trips, mainly due to the fact that I don’t use my smartphone. I have one for emergencies, but it’s never turned on. We can’t get a signal at home and anyway, I have no friends or family to call or text. (Our animals are my family). I found that an outing was being posted on social media in the morning, but by the time I turned on our PC in the evening, it was too late to go. So a lovely lady did something very kind and advertised some more wire wool spinning several days in advance. I accepted the invitation.

We arranged to meet in the car park at Reculver and with an hour to go until sunset, everyone arrived on time. Our spinning expert had brought even more goodies than usual, with bags full of wire wool, glow sticks and even a box of indoor fireworks. The rest of us brought assorted donations and with the load spread between us, we set off in the direction of the beach. The tide was forecast to be low at sunset and so we began searching for a water outlet that someone had seen online. They had been there before, but suspected the mini waterfall had been covered by the high tide. They had, in fact, been standing on top of it all along!

About ten minutes later, someone spotted fast-flowing water, so we all climbed over the sea wall and scrambled down to the shore. We played around with some sunset photography, but I must admit I was put off as I wanted to be low down and as close to the water as possible. I was clearly in the way of everybody else and although they gave me a couple of minutes, I didn’t get the shots I was after. Now I know where to find it, I will make a mental note to return when the sunset coincides with another low tide. It’s a great spot.

After the sun had set, we got stuck into the spinning. This time there was a volunteer to stand in the line of fire, under a wet umbrella. Thankfully I didn’t have to worry about the manual exposure this time, as I had checked my settings from the previous outings. Using my zoom lens at 24mm, I had to get in close. Almost too close for comfort, as at one point, the hot embers were whizzing past my left ear only inches away. I could hear the hissing as they landed in the water all around. My gut instinct was not to run, but rather to put my hand in front of my camera to protect my lens. Thankfully I was able to resist the temptation for the 20-second exposure and the images can be seen above and below. Sadly I had to leave early as I had the furthest to drive home. In fact, I found the motorway had been closed and I didn’t crawl into bed until well after midnight.