The Giants Causeway is situated on the north coast of N.Ireland and is designated a world heritage site. It is visited by thousands of tourists from all over the world every week. The surrounding area is also an area of outstanding natural beauty and boasts some of the most dramatic coastlines in the world. The whole area has also become famous for the HBO tv series Game Of Thrones which is filmed along the north coast and other areas of N.Ireland. The Giants Causeway and in particular the grand causeway is a place that I usually avoid over the summer months as it can get very crowded with tourists and photographers alike all scrambling to get the perfect shot and it's like a swarm of ants jostling for a place if you were to film it from above. I am very lucky that I live only thirty minutes drive away from the causeway so I can visit here all year round including over the winter months when it is a lot quieter. But if you want to get a sunset shot then sometimes you just have to go and hope that you get a little lucky and there is not too many tourists or photographers there.
On this particular occasion, it had been raining most of the day so I decided to give it ago and the forecast was for a sunny end to the day which could mean a dramatic sky and glorious sunset. By the time I got to the causeway, it had stopped raining and there were few tourists about so I had the pick of locations for a while at least. After around an hour or so, the place began to get crowded again and it was difficult to take images without somebody getting in the way but some people have paid thousands of pounds to come here so I just let them be and quietly wait until they have finished (Photographers etiquette) I managed to grab a few nice sunset shots but I sat and waited until the sun went down and the light begins to change and you get that hour after sunset and before nightfall which photographers call "The blue hour" After around half an hour the light was magical and indeed blue with the sixty million-year-old basalt columns lit up in blue with the sky a wonderful orange color. By this time most of the tourists had gone and there were almost no other photographers about which is very rare here so all in all I was lucky and with a bit of planning and local knowledge I was able to get the image I was looking for but it doesn't always work out that way which is why I can come back here again and again to capture this amazing landscape.
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Dimitri Vasileiou • Editor