Walney Weather and Windmills

January snowstorm from Biggar Bank.

Even before I had moved to Walney in the autumn of 2019, I was already fascinated by the wind turbines off the west coast.  At that time, we had the world’s biggest operational offshore windfarm sitting just off our coast and I think, at the time of writing, it is still the largest in Europe.

I had been used to photographing landscapes in the Lakes or on my many trips north of the border to Scotland, so looking west from my home at Askam, and now Walney, was a far cry from the mountains and moorlands, the woodlands and the rivers.  But I actually found this marine landscape intriguing, especially from a photographic perspective.

The snowstorm gathers momentum.

Living so close to the coast has enabled me to spend hours on Askam Pier and the various west shore points on Walney capturing so many different images of the wind turbines in all sorts of different weathers.  January can bring a heavy sea and some really wintery weather whilst the spring, summer and autumn all produce stunning, but very different sunsets.

A fairly calm winter’s sea on a freezing cold day creates blue hues.

A hazy spring evening showing the turbines in a subtle soft light.

I love playing around with different perspectives both in terms of direction and the use of a zoom lens, and my current camera, the Panasonic Lumix FZ330, zooms from 25mm to a pretty stunning 600mm.  This enables me to show a group of turbines in the windfarm or to pull the turbines in pretty close.

At 600mm, the full zoom of the lens foreshortens the perspective and pulls the wind turbines in close.

This is just a small section of the Walney Offshore Wind Farm set against a typical autumn Walney sunset.

You’ll see as my posts develop, that I love playing around with slow shutter speeds and working down on the coast at Biggar Bank, West Shore and Earnse Bay gives me so much time and scope to experiment with some abstract images (which will be the subject of a separate post) and allow me to play with the movement of the turbine blades.

A slow shutter speed, in this case ½ second, shows the movement of the blades against an after-sunset sky.

Once again, a ½ second exposure has enabled me to show movement of the blades in fading light whilst starting to smooth over the sea and create a lovely pastel effect.

A focal length of 200mm creates a large sun dropping down over the horizon.

This is only a small part of what is one of the largest offshore wind farms in Europe, set against the afterglow from an early autumn sunset.