Wind and waves and about town 

Quite a changeable and busy week this week. The weather as we went into last weekend continued to be very windy with rough seas but, as the weekend progressed, the wind dropped and we got some lovely sunshine and warmth for the first half of the week and then it cooled down a bit and we had some rain as we moved into Thursday and Friday.

It's also been a week that just seemed to be busy with 'stuff' to do. The car needed to have a service and was also due to have its ITV (Inspección Técnica de Vehículos) which is like the MOT in the UK. Somehow the combination of the weather and all the other stuff to do seemed to get in the way of me getting out and about as much as I would have liked. Having said that I did still manage to get some interesting, and quite different, images when I did manage to get out.

Starting off when the wind was still strong and there were some big waves crashing into the beach, I decided to try something different and just shoot some close up of the waves. Not the beach, not the sky, not even most of the sea, just the waves themselves. 

This mostly involved using a long lens, watching the sea and trying to predict where the waves were going to break and if they would have some nice light on them when they did,  and then firing off shots and hoping for the best.

I ended up with a couple of interesting shots from this exercise. The first one was shot from the beach looking straight out towards the breaking wave. A fast shutter speed was essential to freeze the movement and bring out all of the texture and foam:

 

The second one was taken from a little way out on one of the breakwaters, this enabled me to get a slightly more sideways view of the waves and I liked the effect of this one:

 

A bit later in the week and the weather had changed. The wind dropped and it was nice and warm. As sometimes happens the sea turned a beautiful turquoise colour and I had to get a shot of the beach and the beautiful sea, I included the marina, watchtower and even the distant Puig Campana mountain in the frame along with some rocks for the foreground:

 

This was another walkabout in El Campello itself and my route took be around by the marina. It was near here that I spotted that someone had planted a sunflower near to the shrine to the Virgin del Carmen. Sunflowers are a bit of a rarity in these parts so I decided to get a shot of it:

 

A bit later I wandered up to the park. While I was at the far end I spotted some movement and a bird landed on the path in front of me. This was not a bird that it is common to see in this part of Spain. although they are more common further south. I knew that there was a least one around El Campello as my cousin had spotted one when he was visiting a few weeks ago, but I hadn't seen it yet.

I had the wrong lens on the camera but there was no time to do anything about that. I quickly zoomed in, changed the aperture to the largest possible, focused and shot, all in about 2 seconds. And this was all the time I had because the bird flew off pretty much as soon as I made the one shot. I had to crop it quite a bit but I was pleased I managed to get it. The bird is a Hoopoe:

 

Pleased with the image I had captured I headed for home.

And so, the final trip of the week.

I decided to head up to Cabezon del Oro mountains for a bit of a hike. The weather was nice and I spent a couple of hours wandering around some of the trails, not really doing much in the way off photography as the conditions and the compositions just didn't seem to work out. That's the way it is sometimes. 

As I was making the return trip to the car the trail led me by a small house that I have walked past on many previous occasions. It is a small place, some kind of agricultural set up as there is a coop with some chickens in and definite signs of working the land. It's perched on a rock just off the trail and is the only occupied place for some distance. I'm not sure what they actually do there but it's certainly a place to 'get away from it all' 

As I said I have passed it many times before but, on this occasion there was some lovely light on the scene and just a small amount of cloud in the sky. I decided today was the day to get a shot of it and here it is:

 

That's it for this week. I'm hoping to get a couple of trips in next week and I'll report back in the next post. Until then, have a great week