22.09.10
Daniel Start: Photographing the UK coastline
Travel writer and photographer Daniel Start has spent the past 10 years documenting the rivers and coastline of Britain for his Wild Swimming guidebooks. Here he offers inspiration to help you capture the spirit of summer. By Sean Samuels.
The need to return to the innocence of his childhood first took hold of Daniel Start in the heat wave summer of 2006. A water baby from an early age, he was working in an office near Victoria Station when the claustrophobic atmosphere of London began slowly to over whelm him. Daniel was brought up near the river Wye in Herefordshire where he spen this childhood making rafts and rope swings and playing on river beaches. He longed to swim once more in pools and rivers, as he had done asa child, but was struggling to find places where he and his friends could run to at the weekend.
Fate intervened with the release of Cool Camping, a guidebook listing the best campsites and camping experiences in England. The book contained plenty of images aswell as practical information and short textural chapters that celebrated the outdoors. Daniel realised he could use the same format for his projected first guidebook, Wild Swimming.
“I was looking at some of the images I had from previous holidays of girls dipping their toes in pools and guys swinging on ropes and thought this was a great subject. You’ve got nature and action. Itis a little bit naughty, but fun at the same time. It had that ‘halcyon days’ feeling with long summer evenings, meadows and flowing white skirts. I thought I could take images that would really make people yearn to get back out to the countryside, to help people remember what it was like to take a swim on a hot summer day.”
Daniel already had a literary agent. He had done some writing before, but they didn’t get the idea of a composite photo book. So he decided to do it on his own and resigned from his job in 2007. Daniel believed that with the cost of printing coming down, the idea of a photographic guidebook wasa genre-breaking format. With cheaper printing you could put together an illustrated guidebook at a normal guide book price but with a coffee table style feel.“This fell between two types of product. It wasn’t a piece of travel literature and it wasn’t a coffee table photography book, so it was quite complicated to pitch and I decided to get going on my own. It was a hot May and I thought ‘let’s just get on with it. I’ll pitch to publishers as I go along and get sample images for the chapters as I progress.’”
Already a keen amateur photographer, Daniel started early explorations that June and he quickly had enough images to put together three chapters. With the help of a book designer, he soon had the material written up “That design we kept and I think it really helped publishers to understand what this new concept was and how the format was going to work. From there I began to call up publishing directors and got names out of the back of similar styles of books.”
One such publisher was Harper Collins. The Dangerous Book for Boys was a big seller at the time and Daniel contacted the company to explain the concept. They were interested and things were looking good. Unbeknown to Daniel a competing book was also being produced and the deal fell through at the end of the summer. But this set back was short-lived. Undeterred, Daniel approached the makers of Cool Camping, his original inspiration. They loved the idea and the project began in earnest, as did a new set of problems.
Wanting to get the best places and illustrate them in both a practical and inspirational way, Daniel visited a large number of locations to find where people ventured into the water. He wanted to find a beautiful watery scene, lovely evening light and pretty people enjoying nature. “I was looking to take images that captured the spirit of it all, the hot summer days, summer holidays, innocence, nature, a secret place. The imagery of the sweet moments of summer when all you want to do is have a picnic in a meadow and lie in a hammock and jump in a pool or climb a tree. That sort of Huckleberry Finn meets Swallows and Amazons meets Wind in the Willows style of photography.”
Although he had a clear idea in mind of what he wanted, the technicalities of getting that all together proved difficult and Daniel faced multiple problems. First he had to find a beautiful place in good weather, but 2007 turned out to be the wettest summer in years. He also needed people there, but with cold water he found swimmers did not hang around for long.
“What I found were ordinary people in their swimwear; they were not professional models and so quite shy, they might not have been wild swimming before and were quite body-conscious. This meant a very narrow window of opportunity and getting that moment on camera was tricky.”
He describes the style of photography required as a cross between landscape and sports reportage. He had to expose correctly for the light and the water, which proved difficult because of reflections.For this reason he advocates exposing for the vegetation because water can often fool the meter. He also realised pictures of people swimming didn’t work that well.The pictures that did work were the ones of people getting in and out of the water or jumping in. However, some people’s reactions to treading on pebbles or the coldness of the water meant a lot of awkward poses and fast movements. At the start, he hadn't realised how difficult this would be. There was the damage to and the loss of kit to contend with as well. Daniel lost several cameras in the water by either falling in the sea or being hit by waves, and was constantly trying to keep the lens clean from water, sea spray and sand. Running around with a telephoto lens taking pictures of half-naked people also looked odd and he had to be careful not to get arrested.
Slowly but surely he over came these obstacles. He upgraded his Canon EOS 400D to an EOS 40D with a 24-105mm lens for the faster frame rate to help him capture movement better. He also kept his kit light with just two lenses and one body. Daniel developed two very different ways of capturing the images he wanted. The first was to visit a place on a hot day, take images of people swimming and then ask them afterwards if he could use the pictures. The second was to take friends who liked swimming to locations and get them set up. Both produced good images and both were essential. “The benefit of the first approach was I could travel on my own as a photographer around the UK without needing to worry about anyone else. This was important because I was working long hours camping in the back of the car, moving around chasing the weather. The summer of 2008 was the worst summer in a hundred years so I was chasing the sunshine and you have to be dedicated to finding what you needed to find.”
The second approach required Danielto direct people. To get this right he suggests first spending time working out how you want to compose your shot and where the best angles are. Ideas include using the arch of a tree to create a frame or using wild flowers in the foreground for interest. A body of water is often quite dark and not that interesting on its own. It’s the way it cuts through the landscape that is attractive.
“I like to get down low, maybe even get in the water or through vegetation so you get that sense of intimacy, that sense of a secret place.”Next you need to work out what you want the person going in the water to do. “Swimming doesn’t look great, it’s just a head bobbing around unless youare looking down and it’s beautifully clear, in which case you are getting the full line of the body.”Daniel found the things that worked well were walking in, sitting by the side, dipping a toe in, jumps and dives, but with jumps he needed to be aware of what was in the background. He also found that anticipating the action was better than holding his finger down and shooting indiscriminately. “Try to estimate the movement that is going to look the most elegant and anticipate when that will be. Get people to do that action a lot and take a lot of pictures to get the image.” Although this second approach was more sociable and meant Daniel could guarantee poses, at times he found it frustrating to follow another agenda when suddenly everyone with him decided to go to the pub just as the light was suddenly beautiful.
“In June or July the absolute sweet spot with the light is just after the time everyone wants to pack up and go home. Everyone wants to be out between noon and 3pm which is when photography is impossible because of the harsh shadows, so I needed a hardier breed of person who was prepared to be out at around seven in the evening, when ideally on holiday you should be cooking up around the campfire or be down the pub.” To compensate for this, Daniel suggests photographing in September when the light is best between 5pm and 6.30 or 7pm. The water is warmer too.
Despite the frustrations and technical difficulties, Daniel has loved every moment of this project. He has visited numerous locations and met a lot of interesting people. His all-time favourite places are the white beaches of the Outer Hebrides or the beaches of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides for the extraordinary blue colours against granite sand. This project started one hot summer while confined to an office when Daniel decided that rather than simply relive the photographic memories from his childhood he would embark on an adventure to create new ones. His determination and perseverance should be an inspiration to us all.
Resources:
- British Tide times The BBC has created a helpful list of regional tide times for the British coastline. www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/tides
- UK?sunrise and sunset times This brilliant website will give you dawn and dusk times throughout the UK. www.sunrisesunsetmap.com
- ROYAL NATIONAL LIFEBOAT INSTITUTION It’s good to support this charity, you never know when you might need its help. www.rnli.org.uk
- Marine Conservation Society The guide for locating clean UK beaches. www.goodbeachguide.co.uk
Biography:
Daniel Start is an award-winning travel writer and photographer, who trained as a naturalist. As a boy he lived for several yearsin the far west of Cornwall. Over the past decade he has toured the UK coastline documenting its secret coves, wild beaches and plunge pools. His first book, The Open Cage, described how he and other naturalists were held hostage by tribespeople during an expedition in the jungles of Papua. It earned himthe 1997 Writers’ Guild Award for Non-Fiction www.wildswimming.co.uk/coastbook.html
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