Exploring Devon’s Coast and Woodland: A Landscape & Astrophotography Journey

Two weeks chasing weather along the wild coast of south Devon, dodging sideways rain one minute and blazing sunrise glare the next. This was almost as unpredictable as Scotland.

It was full-on reactive fieldcraft, wiping sea spray off filters mid‑shot, timing compositions between gusts strong enough to rattle the tripod, groping around in the dark trying to focus on foreground and the stars, which can be quite a challenge while trying to avoid being washed away by a wave in the darkness.

My initial visits to the coast were in appalling conditions. The wind kept cranking up and all colour was obliterated from the sky and landscape. At times like these, black and white is the only way forward.

Having scoped the area. I was drawn to one small cove in particular.

On one of the days, the weather was ideal to capture the sunset, nighttime, Milky Way and then sunrise all in one at this stunning location. To do this, I needed to wild camp on the edge of the cliff to make sure I made the most of my time and opportunities.

So here is sunset, a few days later, when the conditions were ideal to shoot all three images.

Then there was the Milky Way. There was only 1 hour when the Galactic core was visible on the horizon. So I had to work fast before it dipped below. It was a cold, cold night in a sleeping bag and a bivvy bag.

The shots were 20 seconds long at ISO 6400 for the Milky Way and then the foreground was shot at ISO 400 illuminated with a head torch. The images were then blended together so that the scene was sharp from front to back.

I was up an hour before dawn. A restless night in the cold had made sure that I would be up in time.

The sky was cloudless, but again I needed to work quickly to shoot before the full glare of the sun obliterated the serene image of seagulls topping the sea stacks. This was a tricky shot and required a quick plan and an imagination for what can be achieved in post production if I captured the right images.

Although I don’t normally talk much about software when I’m in the field, I do want to mention briefly that the final image from that scene, with the rocks and seagulls suspended above the sea stacks, genuinely came alive after running the RAW file through DxO PureRaw and finishing the mood in Nik Collection. The texture fidelity and noise handling surprised me in the best way. It is these small attentions to detail that set an image apart from the rest of the field.

This required the combination of 1 image that was a 30-second exposure to give an ethereal feel to the sea. This image in turn would obliterate all the seagulls as 30 seconds just makes them disappear from the image. So, a second image to freeze the seagulls was needed, but this was before the sun had fully risen and so still very low light. The shot was fast enough to freeze the gulls, but left me with a very grainy/noisy image of ISO 3200! No landscape photographer in his right mind would entertain shooting at ISO 3200 I hear you say…Watch the video…it works. ISO 3200 could be the new ISO 100.

There is no way to capture these images, which include extremes of movement and extremes of dynamic range, without a bit of planning and then using software skills to blend the composition together. Some might say that this is over-processing, but I would argue that this is deconstructing what the photographer’s human eye and brain see and feel emotionally, and then reconstructing it for the viewer’s benefit.

To see how I did this, feel free to look at my YouTube Vlog.

Apart from this, all the other images were simple. Maybe a long exposure with a neutral density filter and a tripod to give life and depth to the moving water. These are simple tools which need little editing after the event. Just the conversion into Black and White, if that was the final artistic decision and a polariser filter to subtly mute the highlights on leaves.

Accentuating the flow of the water is what gives the images their mood and atmosphere and helps the viewer understand the force and flow of the water in one image, rather than having to watch a video of its flow and ebb over time.

Dartmoor was a close by location and so a morning trip produced some great early autumn forest scenes with bubbling rivers flowing through the dense mossy oak woodland, slick boulders and where every composition had to be earned. Woodland work is slower and more deliberate, but even here I was constantly reacting, waiting for the wind to drop just enough for a clean exposure and avoiding contrast, as bright skies occasionally punched through the forest canopy.

It was here again that simple use of a tripod and natural density filter helped bring the water flowing through the forest to life for the viewer. The exposures were about 1/5th of a second. As you can see, these shots with less than 1 second create much more meaning to the image.

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That was the end of a great two weeks on the South West Coast of England. Much of the time was spent adjusting the images to highlight the water movements in the scenes.

This trip reminded me why I keep coming back to the British coastline. It’s unpredictable, technical, sometimes outright hostile, but when it aligns, there’s nothing else like it.

Hopefully, my next blog will be from the even more outrageous environment of the stunning Scottish Highlands. I return in November and will post then.