Photo Location – Dunwich

All Saints Dunwich by JMW Turner

800 years ago the Suffolk town of Dunwich was the biggest trading port on the east coast. But built as it was on the sandy East Anglian soils  its fate was inevitable and over a couple of centuries Dunwich was consumed by the fierce and frequent storms of the North Sea.  The magnificent ruined All Saints church, once  painted by Turner, was lost in the most recent major collapse around 100 years ago.

No doubt it’s this vulnerability overshadowing Dunwich that has discouraged development in the area and created something of a time warp just a few miles off the A12.

There’s always a warm welcome at the Ship Inn on Dunwich’s  one remaining street. Overlooking the coastal marshes, The Ship, which unusually for the area is a free house, offers superb ale, tasty food and affordable accommodation all year round. It’s a great base for walking and cycling and ideal for a weekend break.

Much of what Dunwich has to offer the photographer is tucked away and easily missed by those just passing through. The many bridleways and by-roads are inaccessible to cars and offer secluded, and often hard to find walking and cycling routes between the villages and hamlets of an area that has changed little over many years.

Graveyard maintenance at Dunwich

 I used one of our loan cameras at Phototuition, the Panasonic GF-1 with the 20mm lens for the shot of the sheep in the graveyard, taking care to set the lens at the widest possible aperture to avoid unsightly flare from the sun which, although a little softened by hazy cloud, was in the image. Both this picture and the one of the ruined windmill on the sea marshes were edited in Photoshop Elements. The classic Sepia tone was achieved by converting the images to black and white and then tinting them by adding a little red and yellow in the adjust colour option.

 

 

Fortunately the windmill had an interesting sky behind it and by shooting in raw and  checking the camera’s histogram I set the exposure to capture detail in both the mill and the sky.

 A few moments with the quick selection tool in Elements enabled me to darken the sky and then lighten the windmill somewhat to create the perfect balance.

 

A few small fishing boats and tarred huts line the beach at Dunwich just a couple of hundred yards down the road from the Ship Inn. There’s also a large beach cafe, ever popular for its superb fish and chips. A bracing walk along the shingle bank at the edge of the salt marshes  to Walberswick will take you about an hour but there’s an excellent pint and good food at the Bell Inn to greet you there.

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The Suffolk coast  is scattered with fascinating little villages all the way from Southwold down to Felixtowe. Sizewell, Orford and Shingle Street are all worth a visit and offer great photo opportunities. Go when the skies are stormy and build them into your landscapes. Two thirds sky, one third land, Just like the Suffolk coast.