Down By the Sea [Rf Photo of the Day]

Photo © Jay Doherty

Photographers living in North Donegal, Ireland, know that they have a beautiful, rugged landscape at their doorstep, though the environ is also shaped by harsh weather, says Jay Doherty. “Photographers this far north are well versed in working around some extreme weather fronts. This day was no different.”

Fortunately, Doherty and these newlyweds were able to escape the worst of this storm by “taking refuge in a forest,” he says, but before they tied things up and headed back to the safety of the reception, he knew they still needed “something powerful, a work of art that would speak volumes of the land the people grew up in and their love for one another. We pulled up to the shore in the car, wrapped the bride up in a blanket and aided them out onto this pontoon. I took my place a few hundred yards down the coast.”

Doherty used a basic speed light for the the frames, three in all. Looking at his camera’s LCD, Doherty thought this one was a bit too wide, but later, as it turned out, it made for a perfect double-page spread in the couple’s album and a large wall print. That sort of made up for the fact that—while the couple darted back to the car scot-free of rain—Doherty trekked back from his post amid a downpour of rain and hail. Driving back to his hotel in his boxers, with his trousers drying on the dashboard, he was, he says, “cold and soaked but very stoked.”

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