Clothesline

The image I'm currently using as the header for the blog is one that often gets questions and comments. The idea is actually very simple and straightforward and the production of the photograph was equally as simple. A shop that specialises in outdoor clothing, hiking gear and camping equipment was launching a new website and the photograph depicts that they are 'now online'.



The pre-production planning was fairly minimal and comprised a vague idea of an area of the North Wales coastline that would be a suitable location. Then a tide calendar was consulted and weather forecasts were studied until we came to a suitable day that would be sunny with blue sky and a tide that would give us plenty of beach to play on.



A car was loaded up with a clothes line, a spare clothes line, a couple of boxes of props to hang on the line plus other bits and pieces we thought might be needed, things like guy ropes to anchor the upright posts and a sledge hammer to bed them well into the ground. Fortunately, the North Wales coast road has plenty of side roads and junctions which allowed us to easily and quickly look at several possible locations until we found one that offered easy access from car to beach and was suitably positioned to give a very big open sky and landscape as a background.



After unloading the car and carrying everything to the sand dunes it was then a fairly straightforward job of setting up the vertical metal posts and anchoring them to a fence at one end and tied to some lumps of driftwood at the other. What we hadn't anticipated was that once the props were pegged onto the line, the weight made the line sag so low that it was touching the sand in the middle but we had brought with us a lighter set of clothes line poles as spares and one was used in the middle of the line to help hold everything up. What can't be seen in the final photo is that the coastal sea breeze was too strong against the coats and jackets which were acting like sails and the middle pole soon started to bend under the weight. In the final image, the client is actually lying as low as possible in the dunes holding the pole steady at arms length while I was photographing enough frames to know that there would be a good overall compositional balance of the items blowing in the wind.



The one last thing that isn't shown in the final image is that all the while we had the clothes line set up, we were getting some very strange looks from the people walking along the beach. They could be seen looking at each other and then looking towards us and we just knew exactly the sort of conversation they were having!