Yachts in Galway Bay

I received a text message from my Dad last night which read “I feel a yacht coming up on your blog”.  I had to laugh, because he was spot on.  Yesterday, having posted an image from Lough Eske, I promised to post another “in a couple of days time” and the reason that I left myself some leeway is the same reason my Dad sent me that text – because yesterday Galway was due to be announced as the final port of call in the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12, and I was planning on marking that with a post from last June’s stopover of the race.  He knows me well.

He might have been expecting a different sort of picture – I thought myself that I’d select a different type of picture to this one – an action shot taken from the media boat in the midst of the in-port racing, perhaps.  However the shots I have along those lines which haven’t been posted previously (or haven’t made it to my slideshow of VOR images that I’ve linked to in the past here and on Twitter) are essentially more of the same and so I opted for something in a different style.

This photo was taken on the Friday afternoon of the in-port racing weekend (also the June bank holiday weekend) as the 7 yachts were having a practice run on the course in Galway Bay.  Having photographed that morning’s skippers’ press conference, and having seen the yachts off from the docks, I drove out towards Barna and stopped off at Silver Strand to capture this image (amongst others).

This was taken with a 70-200mm lens at the wider end.  I took a subsequent shot of the guy with the binoculars at 200mm, making for a tighter frame, but sadly in that shot the dog is half way across binocular-man’s body, and it is more than a little jarring.

One of the real challenges that weekend was overcoming the glare that resulted from it being so very sunny.  I’m not one to complain about sun, but it did make getting good photographs difficult, especially for shots which had lots of water in the frame, as inevitably most of them did.

This shot works ok with that light, I think, because the near silhouettes on the beach -  a consequence of exposing for the bright water and sky – are distinct and their shapes remain easily identifiable. You can’t identify anyone’s face, but the figures are useful and interesting compositional elements in the frame.  I opted for a letter box frame because the sky above what I’ve left in here did little to add to the frame, and similarly any more foreground would have left the viewer’s eye wandering.

As it is the yachts are secondary to the figures on the beach in this shot.  It may not be the most obvious of choices, therefore, to mark the Volvo Ocean Race’s return to Galway in two years time, but it will indeed be back, and I plan on being there again too.  I’ll probably bring a camera…