White Feather, Cadgwith, Cornwall

I have friends, Anne and Peter, who live at White Feather, a house on a cliff top in Cornwall, above the fishing village of Cadgwith and close to the Lizard - the southernmost point in the UK.

The house looks out towards the South-east, across what looks at first like empty open sea, but is in fact a major shipping lane crisscrossed by small boats and huge cargo ships.

Here the light and atmosphere change constantly, but with a certain rhythmic consistency, driven by on- and off shore winds that change with the time of day.

A striking thing is the rapid shifts in contrast and brightness, and the way in which the human eye accommodates to this, dealing with a much wider tonal range than photography can capture and reproduce.

As a result, in some of the sequences that follow I have allowed myself the licence to make a more emotional interpretation of the images than I normally would. But overall I have tried to render the effects of light and and atmosphere as accurately as the camera will allow.