Shrimping

Southport Potted Shrimps or Potted Southport Shrimps? When I was a lad the latter were the choice of the locals as they were guaranteed to have been caught off the Southport beach. The others might only have been potted in the town!

There are still some professional shrimpers working the area with the tractors and modified vehicles which replaced genuine horsepower decades ago. There are also a few people doing it purely for their own pleasure without mechanical aids. In fact two people I know have mentioned to me recently that they used to go shrimping in their younger days and have considered getting tooled up to do it again. Today at the beach I bumped into a couple of guys who had been thinking along the same lines and gone and done it.

I'd gone out armed with the telephoto and wide angle zooms, expecting to find the kite surfers out in force. Either I'd missed them or they'd gone elsewhere. The tide was on the way out so it took a while to get to the water's edge. After asking if it was okay to take some snaps I made an effort at recording the shrimping process.

What surprised me back on the computer was that I'd made more pictures with the longer lens and that it managed to convey the feeling of open space. Wide angle lenses get too much in for my liking when it comes to landscapes. They're better for getting in close as with the shot above. Once more I'm not concerned that the horizon is both curved and sloping. Some shots demand a level horizon, some don't. For me this one doesn't.

Putting together a set of pictures is always a challenge. There will be some good ones which have to be left out because they don't fit the sequence. The set below could probably lose one or two if I was being completely ruthless. It's a pity the shrimps weren't playing, though, as they would have finished the sequence off nicely.


There wasn't much to photograph on the twenty minute walk back from the low tide mark. Stranded starfish are not my cup of tea. A bit of broken plastic up near the high water mark is more like my preferred brew.

Heading for home I called in at the bird watching hide to avail myself of the facilites, wherein I made another abstraction. It's the sort of picture that could be used in a 'What is it?" competition!

Making abstractions like these two is all well and good, but I increasingly find making pictures to form a series interests me more. The series can either be a set of visually or thematically related pictures, or of a more documentary nature. I like the idea that the whole can become more than the sum of its parts. That even a slightly weak image can work in the context of the overall series by the way it relates to other images. The problem is that this demands a more concerted effort than I can manage in the spare time I have available, so things get done in a less than fully committed way, or take longer to bring to fruition. Which is frustrating.

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