The great thing about piers from a photographic perspective is that the straight lines lend themselves so well to compositions. I always try to make a point of directing any diagonal lines into the corner of shots if I can.

Let’s start with the nice things about Blackpool. The Blackpool Tower is lovely. Great architecture, wonderful decor, stunning views from the tower’s observation deck.

The Blackpool Tower Ballroom was particularly nice and surprisingly large inside. It was nice to be able to wander about freely and enjoy people partaking in tea or dancing.

Blackpool’s got a pier, which was pretty basic but you’ll not find me saying a bad word about piers as I’m a bit of a fan of piers. Why not see for yourself by checking out other piers I’ve liked?

It also had some lovely trams that ran at night, lit up, very pretty.

The rest of Blackpool was a shithole.

The main appeal to us in picking Herne Bay for an early pitstop was to check out its pier as we’re rather fond of piers when we’re out and about. Until 1978 the pier at Herne Bay had been the second-longest in the United Kingdom but a storm destroyed the central section leaving part of it isolated at sea and no repairs were ever made. What’s left isn’t much but it was nice to see it anyway on our fleeting trip to the town and I took a handful of photos of and from the shoreline area. We also discovered that Herne Bay had the world’s first purpose-built, freestanding clock tower so our short trip to the small town uncovered quite a bit of interesting history.

The weather was good for our stay in Southend and though we were mostly using it as a seaside base to explore elsewhere there was one particular attraction jutting out from the coast that we were very keen on visiting: Southend Pier. Over two kilometres in length with a train to take you down or back and the longest pleasure pier in the world so we had to pay it a visit. We timed our trip to the pier perfectly to allow us to walk from the beach out to the end for a look around and some photographs before taking the last train back to dry land. It was quite fun taking our time and walking out to sea as the trains carrying other passengers rumbled past.

At the end of Southend Pier we watched as the sun slowly set on the horizon throwing some lovely colours into the sky and making for some stunning views and lovely opportunities to take some more photos. We’ll always wander onto a pier if there’s one around and it was nice to hit the longest in the world and see such a glorious sight to cap it off.

The nice surprise – in addition to the weather which was fresh but bright and clear – was that the architecture of the buildings along Hastings seafront was really attractive. There were several examples of Art Deco design to be seen which, after brutalist, is my favourite style of architecture in use. We don’t see very much Art Deco at home, quite likely because anything that was there was probably bombed during the war, so it’s always lovely to see some around. On top of that, Hastings had a pier and a quick look around the various places we’ve travelled to in and around England will soon show you that we do like a nice pier.

• I took the photos in JPG mode, not RAW, and I probably took them with automatic settings. These days I’ll only shoot RAW photos, typically deliberately underexposed by 2/3, typically in aperture priority mode to control depth of field. That’s the sort of thing that comes from experience and style choice.
• Sensor dirt! Sensor dirt is the bane of my life and since upgrading to the Canon 5D Mark II several years back I assumed that sensor dirt was worse with the newer camera and not something that ever affected my first one; that turns out to be very wrong. From looking back at these old photos of mine I’m finding just as many dust marks on the pictures so it seems that possibly a combination of a more sensitive sensor on the newer model plus my gained experience at spotting sensor dirt is what’s really taken place.

The photos below showing off Southsea, the pier, the beach, the castle, and outside the D-Day Museum are not processed in any way other than to spot heal the sensor dirt.

I’m quite fond of street art and love seeing the different styles when I’m abroad on travels. The street art we saw in Punta Arenas was less abstract and more realistic than that we’d seen elsewhere, with some even being in the form of trompe-l’œil.

We spotted a rather disquieting sign indicating that this area of Punta Arenas was a tsunami hazard zone. This made sense on account of the number of volcanoes that were in that region of South America.

The maritime monument marked the northernmost point along the Punta Arenas shoreline that we reached as we were conscious of just how much time we had left in the city.

The walk along the seafront area of Punta Arenas produced plenty of opportunities to take some photos with interesting compositions thanks to numerous straight lines in the form of collapsed piers or tram lines. The flat sea conditions helped a lot too.

Later that evening we would hear one American woman remarking how amazing it had been to see all the penguins along the beach. They weren’t penguins. They were cormorants and they were in abundance as we walked back towards the city’s dock to catch the tender boat back to the Star Princess. Quite how she thought they had got up onto the wooden pillars or how she hadn’t seen some of them occasionally flying off in exactly the way penguins don’t completely escaped us.

We liked seeing the chess boards set up along the shoreline. We imagine it would have been a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon in Punta Arenas.

The port area had the usual collection of souvenir shops and information points but we didn’t find anything of interest to us there and headed straight to where the tender boats were pulling up and ferrying passengers back to the cruise ship.

It’s always nice when you can sit up top on a cruise ship’s tender boat and we were lucky enough to get this chance as we left Punta Arenas and made our short trip back to the Star Princess. This gave us some lovely views of the other vessels in the port, the numerous other tender boats moving between the land and the ship, and the ship itself.

The Weston-super-Mare SeaQuarium does manage to pack in quite a bit more than you expect from its apparent size from outside. One area where it is superior to a lot of other sealife exhibits we’ve seen is that it’s considerably brighter in a lot of places which aids in photography, always a tricky area when visiting these places as you have to ramp the ISO up massively high, often have to fight with the camera to hit the focus correctly, and have to accept lots of noise in the resulting pictures.

There had been nobody else in the SeaQuarium when we first arrived which wasn’t that surprising with it being a Tuesday at the end of October but we were pleased to see close to a dozen were present by the time we left. As expected, it wasn’t the most amazing aquarium we’ve visited but there was more than enough to see for anyone who likes these sorts of places.

As Halloween was upon us there was a section of the building given over to scary exhibits. My wife, suspecting (correctly) that such a place would contain a spider stayed away but I ventured inside the dark area. Some leaf insects were surprising additions as I don’t really consider them terrifying to anybody. A coiled, giant millipede was motionless, as was the anticipated tarantula at the back of its home. The clever area was a glass room next to which was a section you could enter and stick your head up into a perspex bowl to get up close with whatever was inside. I’ll admit that my heart was racing as my suspicion was that there would be more spiders and while I’m nowhere near as bad as my wife this wouldn’t be something I’d like to experience. The darkness in the room made it difficult to see anything which obviously sent the imagination into overdrive but once I’d actually spotted the terror I called my wife in for a look. Rats. We love rats. Adrenalin flowed away nicely. A nice little exhibit by Weston-super-Mare’s SeaQuarium.

Whereas we’d been in short sleeves for our trip down to Cornwall this was a day where we needed to wrap up warm as the wind coming in off the shore was bitterly cold. At one point we’d stopped for lunch in a pub and been seated by the door as it had been the only place available at the time; an icy blast every time someone came in or out ensured we wolfed everything down and were back out and walking in short order.

At one point on our walk we became aware of some shouting behind us. A woman with a dog had spotted my camera and wanted to know what lens I had on. I told her and she pointed out to the water which was approaching high tide at that point. In the distance there was something small and red floating and being carried out. “Can you take a look and see what it is?” she asked, explaining that she wanted to make sure it wasn’t a child. I explained I wouldn’t be able to tell with the camera lens I had as it was a wide angle with zoom to only 105mm.

“I’m a professional photographer!” she said. “Let me have a go!”

“I assure you that you won’t see anything. The water is grey. The sky is grey. The thing in the water is miles away and small and clearly inanimate. The sunlight is coming from behind the object so it will desaturate everything further. The zoom will not help. The screen will not magnify to a 1:1 ratio. It won’t show anything. I might get something from taking the photo off onto a computer and magnifying properly but that’s not going to happen any time soon.”

“If you give me the camera I can do it. I’m a professional photographer.”

“I’ll take the photo and zoom in… Look. You can’t tell.”

“Give me the camera. I’m a professional photographer.”

She reached for the camera and I slowly and very obviously grudgingly let her have it. She zoomed, took the photo, looked at the screen. “Oh,” she said, handing it back. “I usually have a telephoto lens when I’m out but I don’t today,” she added and I smiled and said I tend to only take whatever lens I think I’ll use for the day and this felt like a wide landscape day to me. My wife returned to my side from the position she’d taken up behind the woman in order to prevent her running off with the kit (we’re both usually very aware of our surroundings and people and always move and organise our things to reduce the risk of thefts, etc., although it probably wasn’t quite warranted on this occasion). The woman decided that the thing at sea probably wasn’t a person and walked along with us for a while telling us some of the history of the seaside resort before finally heading off with her dog.

“I’m very proud of you,” my wife told me, regarding how I’d handed my camera over to the woman and not told her to fuck off like my face apparently seemed to convey. I then ranted for several minutes about how a “professional photographer” should have more damn respect for other people and their equipment and how it was blindingly obvious to anyone from one look at the equipment I was carrying and my explanation about why the photo wouldn’t work that I was far from a rank amateur, not that that should matter one iota when it comes to demanding someone else’s possessions. “Just drop it!” I was then told so I shut up until now when I could rant some more. Oh, it feels good to vent.

And now for some more photos from along Weston-super-Mare’s seafront.

We’d checked the time for high tide to make sure we’d be on the Grand Pier when the water was actually in as the previous time we’d visited Weston-super-Mare back in 2013 it had resulted in us not seeing the water once and only arguing whether the bright flashes on the horizon were reflections on the distant sea or simply mirages. We can at least confirm now that it is possible on occasion to swim when visiting Weston-super-Mare’s seafront.

Until this point we’d assumed that everyone aboard the bus was on the same excursion but this turned out not to be true. Four people travelling with us had booked a different trip; one that included the waterfalls we were visiting on this tour but which skipped the town and beach coming up for us with a walk on a glacier instead. After leaving Skógafoss we took a quick detour in order to drop these people off at Sólheimajökull where they were due to meet with local guides for their trip and from where we would later return to pick them up on the way back to Reykjavík.

After that we were on our way again and didn’t stop until we’d reached the farthest point from Iceland’s capital city that this tour would be taking us to.

Vík í Mýrdal

Vík í Mýrdal (or Vík for short) is the most southerly village in Iceland. Despite the small number of local inhabitants the village can hold several times its permanent number in hotels and other accommodations in the area as the location is often used by scientific teams because of some interesting features of the town. Drawing a line directly south there is no landmass at all between Vík and Antarctica. To the north lies the Katla volcano, currently covered by a glacier as it has not erupted since 1918. It is believed that when the volcano does erupt it will melt enough of the glacier to flood almost the entire village so evacuation drills are regularly held in order that people know how to get to the higher land in a timely manner. The prominent church in Vík is the congregation point for those drills.

The geology of the area around Vík comprises black basalt giving everything an odd look for a beach if you’re just used to golden sand elsewhere in the world but one that seems so perfectly right in Iceland. A few people from our tour group headed down towards the beach but the majority seemed keen to hit the large supermarket and store near where our bus had parked or wandered into the village to see whether any of the cafés or restaurants or wool shops were open. We had spotted a rocky jetty extending out into the sea and although we’d been warned that the sea conditions were often extremely dangerous in this area we could see nothing but calm conditions and decided to head down to it and see how far out we could get. We weren’t the only ones. We’re suckers for piers and jetties. I can’t exactly explain it but we’re just drawn to them. There’s a wonderful feeling being out from the mainland with sea in most directions and being able to look back and get a bigger picture of what’s ashore.

Due to the village’s sheltered positioning and direct face towards the Gulf Stream it is among the wettest and warmest places in Iceland, the former environmental condition not being a problem at all for us during our clear sky visit to Vík and the latter being something we discussed at the time as we noticed that the deadly chill from the wind we’d experienced at Skógafoss had almost completely transformed into something remarkably close to quite pleasant on the coast.

Once the rocks of the jetty became too large and uneven to easily progress without the fear of slipping off or turning an ankle and after we’d had a discussion about just what we’d do if we saw the distant glacier explode into steam ahead of a flooding event because the volcano was erupting (answer: hold onto a boulder and hope) we headed back onto land and wandered a little farther west of Vík as we’d seen an interesting-looking sculpture in that area.

That sculpture turned out to be one half of the Voyages Sculpture by Steinunn Thorarinsdottir. The sculpture represents the friendship between Vík in Iceland and Hull in England where a matching sculpture stands (although the one in Hull isn’t the original as that was stolen by scrap metal thieves in 2011), both places having a long fishing history together only broken during the Cod Wars. Voyages was jointly commissioned by the British and Icelandic governments. An interesting fact about Steinunn Thorarinsdottir – at least for us as it’s our home city – is that she was educated at the University of Portsmouth.

We headed back to the bus in plenty of time to take a look around a large and well-stocked shop for tourists and make use of the public toilets before it was time to board and head just along the coast to our next stop.

Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach

From the photos from Vík above you can see that there were some basalt sea stacks to the west of the village. Our destination was the other side of them which, because of the rocky headland jutting out into the sea and because buses don’t float very well, meant a drive north, then west, then south to get to where we needed to be. This reasonably short drive gave us a slightly closer view of the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap covering the Katla volcano.

A decent-sized car park was pretty full when we arrived and indicated clearly that Reynisfjara was a popular destination for tourists visiting Iceland. It was very easy to see why, though. East of the beach and beyond the basalt rocks on it were the prominent basalt columns jutting up from the sea while to the west there was a clear view of Dyrhólaey, a peninsula with a couple of very obvious arches of rock visible. Our guide on the bus had mentioned that someone had actually flown through the larger arch on a microlight craft.

We didn’t have anywhere near enough time to head down towards Dyrhólaey but it was the basalt columns that were of more interest to everyone anyway. They are known as the Reynisdrangar and Icelandic legend claims they are the petrified remains of trolls who’d dragged a three-masted ship towards shore but got caught by the sunrise. That’s so like a troll to do that.

The rocky headland that separates Reynisfjara from Vík is also basalt and is also fascinating to look at especially if you’ve never seen basalt rock formations before. We hadn’t. I love seeing geometric patterns and structures produced by natural processes. Just like the Reynisdrangar in the sea the basalt formations on land and the large but shallow cave in the headland were big hits with photographers amongst the tourists visiting this particular part of Iceland’s south coast.

Sea birds circled endlessly above the Reynisfjara headland. This area is home to puffins – a favourite bird of my wife’s for some reason I’ve never delved into – but you’ve obviously got to visit at the right time of year to see them and it didn’t appear that early December was it.

Iceland doesn’t really have rolling landscapes, or at least the bits of Iceland we’ve seen across two visits to the country don’t. The bits that aren’t mountains are flat and there are very few instances where neither feature applies. It makes for a land that often makes you feel small. You’re small against the vast, open flat areas; you’re small against the glacier-topped and snow-peaked mountains; you’re small under the night sky when it’s clear and especially when there are aurorae active. Distances look huge but everything looks within easy reach. We could see some of that very Icelandic view as we came back from the beach to the parking area ahead of our departure. Iceland is a country that gets to you and you can sense how it molds the people who live there.

There were a few buildings around the parking area at Reynisfjara, including a public toilet and a small dining establishment. We had no need of either and waited around to grab a few final photos until we saw members of our tour group starting to appear and board the bus.

In the third and final part of this south coast Iceland excursion we’ll hit the Sólheimajökull glacier to pick up the tour group passengers we’d dropped there earlier before our second waterfall of the day, Seljalandsfoss.