My 2028 Cornwall Calendar Challenge Begins

Creating a Cornwall calendar sounds fairly straightforward: visit 12 beautiful locations, take 12 photographs and send them to the printer.

Unfortunately, Cornwall’s weather, tides and occasionally questionable cooperation have other ideas.

Over the next 12 months, I’m setting myself the challenge of photographing 12 locations around Cornwall, with each image representing a different month in a 2028 calendar. The project begins at Godrevy, where I hoped to capture a photograph worthy of representing September.

Planning Around the Tide

As I work full-time, nearly every photograph in this project will need to be captured at the weekend. That makes planning considerably more important because the right tide, light and weather must all align with either a Saturday or Sunday.

For Godrevy, low tide was an important part of the plan. It would reveal more of the beach and rocks around Gwithian, giving me a wider range of foregrounds and viewpoints than I would have at high tide.

Sunday 6 September offered the first suitable opportunity, so I headed out early to make the most of the quieter morning.

A Quiet Morning at Gwithian

The conditions were promising when I arrived. The tide was low, there were relatively few people around and an enormous sky stretched above the coastline.

The weather gave me a mixture of clear patches and cloud rather than one completely uniform sky. This offered several different backgrounds for the lighthouse and meant that the appearance of the scene changed as I moved along the beach and around the rocks.

Godrevy Lighthouse is an obvious subject, but that also makes it a difficult one. It has been photographed countless times, so simply pointing the camera towards it wasn’t enough. I wanted to explore how the lighthouse related to the sky, coastline and exposed rocks rather than returning with another predictable record shot.

Photographing Godrevy With Three Different Lenses

I took my complete landscape lens selection with me: the 12–28mm, 24–70mm and 100–300mm.

The 12–28mm allowed me to include more of the beach, rocks and huge September sky. With such a wide lens, the challenge was preventing the lighthouse from becoming an insignificant dot in the distance.

The 24–70mm provided a more balanced view, retaining enough of the surrounding landscape while giving the lighthouse greater presence within the frame.

The 100–300mm offered something different again. The longer focal lengths allowed me to isolate the lighthouse and experiment with different backgrounds, creating more compressed and simplified compositions.

Using all three lenses gave me a much broader collection of photographs than relying on one obvious viewpoint. Some images concentrate on the wider environment, while others make the lighthouse the clear subject.

Filming the Experience

Alongside the photography, I also filmed the morning for my YouTube channel.

I captured footage from the journey, recorded parts of the camera setup and filmed vlog sections while exploring the beach and rocks. I want the video to show more than just the finished photographs. The planning, changing compositions and decisions made on location are all part of this project.

Not every photography outing needs a dramatic disaster to create a story. Nothing particularly disastrous happened at Godrevy, which was rather inconsiderate of Cornwall from a filmmaking perspective. The conditions were useful, the location was relatively quiet and I had time to explore properly.

The real challenge came from deciding when I had done enough. With the lighthouse continually changing against different sections of sky, there was always another composition or focal length to try.

Did I Capture September’s Calendar Photograph?

Possibly.

I returned home with a rather substantial collection of images, but I haven’t examined them all properly yet. Viewing photographs briefly on the back of the camera is very different from reviewing them carefully on a larger screen.

The calendar photograph cannot simply be the sharpest or most colourful image from the morning. It needs to work as part of a complete collection of 12 photographs, represent September and still hold my attention when printed at calendar size.

My next job is therefore to process the photographs, create a shortlist and compare the strongest compositions. At the moment, I believe the September image is somewhere among them—but I’m not awarding it the calendar position until it has survived a proper review.

If none of the photographs proves strong enough, I will return. The objective isn’t merely to tick Godrevy off the list; it is to produce an image that has genuinely earned its place.

The First Month Is Underway

Godrevy was a successful beginning to the challenge. The tide cooperated, the beach remained reasonably quiet and the mixture of cloud and clear sky gave me several different interpretations of the lighthouse.

There are still another 11 locations to photograph, with future outings depending on winter waves, woodland colour, spring flowers, summer heather and numerous tides landing conveniently at weekends.

What could possibly go wrong?

Once I’ve reviewed the Godrevy photographs, I’ll reveal which image—if any—has been selected for September in my 2028 Cornwall calendar.

You can follow the complete project here on the 4hotographix website and watch the photography outings on my YouTube channel as the calendar gradually comes together.