Couple

"We went to Newbiggin to photograph dolphins, and all I got to blip was this statue."

Actually, I like the statue: it's entitled "Couple" by artist Sean Henry and was erected at the coastal town of Newbiggin, Northumberland, in 2007. It shows this couple looking out to sea. If you look closely in large you'll see that they have spiky "hair", presumably to deter seagulls from perching on them; judging by the amount of Brylcreem guano on them I fear that it's not very effective! After its erection, the statue has inspired an art trail around the town, which now has over 60 pieces.

"Now what's all this about dolphins?" you may well ask. If you saw my blip write-up on Sunday you'll know that I've enrolled in a 5-week webinar course on wildlife photography - and we have homework to do each week! For this first week we have to choose an animal and research its habits, etc, the better to anticipate when and where would be good to photograph it. By chance on Monday a friend told me that there's a number of dolphins swimming up and down the northeast coast at present (in fact they've been here for the last few summers - how didn't I know...?!) - so I've decided to choose them to study. There's a facebook group called "Newbiggin Dolphin Watch" with posts about sightings, and this morning they were seen at Blyth then Newbiggin. However they were faster than we were in the car (they don't have to cope with traffic lights, roundabouts and contraflows) so we missed them. But at least we've found good viewpoints so hopefully we may get lucky in the next week or two. I've photographed dolphins before in Madeira and New Zealand (see the extra here) but it would be nice to capture shots of them near home.