Weekly Photo Challenge: Angular


This weeks photography challenge is Angular and straight away I knew I was going to include this photograph in my post.

Talacre Lighthouse

I took this photograph on Saturday evening, only yesterday, on the beach at Talacre. Regular readers will know that the lighthouse features in many of my photographs and I’ll tell you why. The lighthouse is the only constant and even that changes over time as the paint is worn away by wind and waves. Talacre beach is open and exposed and often subject to wild seas. This photograph was taken at low tide and at the moment you can see the lighthouse base. But when the tide comes in the sea rises as high as the painted black area and in stormy conditions higher. Those sand dunes you can see in the background used to be a lot higher but storms at the beginning of this year totally washed them away.

Photographs testify to the relentless effacements of time. I say “inevitably” because the photographer has little to say about it. No matter what the conceptual intent of the photographer – whether it be “serious” image-making or family snapshots – the camera renders, first and foremost, and with indisputable sufficiency, the details and lineaments of its subject: a smooth, fresh, laughing face, the sleek angularity of a new building, a dotted veil worn by a woman coming out of church. Years later – when the young face is wrinkled and the modern building looks corny and nobody wears veils anymore – these photographs tell a story. And who could have guessed what that story would be? The melancholy of Time inheres in photographs, in the resemblance that no longer resembles. – John Rosenthal – Ideas, from The National Humanities Center

And so that brings me nicely back to Angular. I said at the start of this post I was going to include this photograph because it has so many angles. Yes! The lighthouse does lean, that big dark cloud with the obtuse angle and the way the water creates angles as it courses down the beach towards the sea. I did however keep the horizon straight. Can you see the man on the beach? He was using one of those portable metal detectors and finding quite a lot of things, mainly old coins and some shrapnel left over from WWII.

“Talacre was used by the military during World War II, as an aircraft firing range. Fighters flew over the remote village every day, shooting at wooden targets in the dunes and at drogues towed by aircraft. It was also used for testing new devices, such as “window” the anti-radar foil that, on occasion, covered the whole village with silver”. Source Wikipedia

That wraps it up for this week. I hope you enjoyed the photograph and as usual please feel free to use it if you want as long as it’s not for commercial use. Clicking on the photograph will take you to my Flickr stream where you can download any of the 1200 pixels wide photographs.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.
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13 replies to “Weekly Photo Challenge: Angular”

  3. Pingback: WordPress photo challenge: Angular | Change Is Hard

    1. That lighthouse has been popular this weekend Yvonne, at least 10 photographers from the North Wales FB Page have visited this weekend. It must be something to do with the relatively mild weather we are experiencing at the moment. Normally Talacre is a cold, wind sept, desolate place in winter

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