This autumn has been rather busy. In the last eight weeks I have run residential workshops in Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, North Wales, Northumberland, the Peak District and Madeira with most of the days in between these trips filled with one day workshops, camera club talks and photography commissions. Not that I am complaining, I find myself in the fortunate position to be spending my time doing something that I enjoy. If only there were more of it (time rather than enjoyment). It was my intention to write a blog about each trip but I’ve fallen behind on all of the processing so have no photos to illustrate the blog posts. My last trip was to Madeira and I was determined to catch up and write this blog while it was still fresh in my ageing memory.

Famous for wine, cake and year round sun (you can see the attraction already!), Madeira is the largest of an archipelago of islands in the Atlantic about 300 miles off the coat of North Africa. These rugged islands are the summits of mountains rising from their base on the ocean floor to jut out of the crashing Atlantic waters reaching a height of 1861m above sea level at Pico Ruivo in the centre of Madeira. Away from the dramatic rocky coast, the islands slopes are lush and green with exotic crops growing in terraced strips covering every available space around the villages that cling to steep hill sides. With so much variety in a compact island just 35 miles long and 13 miles wide, it’s no surprise it’s such a great place for landscape photography.

As it’s four years since I last ran a workshop here, I spent a few days re-aquainting myself with the island before the workshop started beginning with the coast. Although Madeira is a place for winter sun, it isn’t really a place for beach lovers. The coast is rocky and dramatic with cliffs often plunging hundreds of meters into the deep blue of the Atlantic, the waters foaming to aqua and white around rock stacks. I had several favourite coastal viewpoints to re-visit and explore further and several more new ones I wanted to discover and I came away with the impression that there are scores more around the island waiting to be explored.

Particular favourites are the huge rock stacks and boulder covered shoreline reminiscent of Northumberland at Ribeiro da Janella on the north-west coast and the smaller but no less compelling rocky outcrop know as Black Devil’s Tower in the south-east.

It is almost hypnotic watching the waves seethe around the rocks especially perhaps for those of us from somewhere like East Anglia where the conditions on the sandy beaches and gently meandering estuaries are much calmer.

There is more to the coast than dramatic seas though, fishing villages and seaside towns like Ponta do Sol and even the capital city, Funchal all make for good subjects especially at dusk when the lights come on.

Although coastal photography is probably my first love and one of the main attractions of Madeira for me, perhaps its biggest highlights are inland. One of these is Pico do Arieiro, at 1818m, it is the third highest peak on the island and with a (rather narrow and twisty, white knuckle) road leading to a car park at the top, the most accessible. On a clear day from here you can see Ponta de Sao Lourenco, one of the islands many coastal wonders, jutting out to sea on the eastern tip of the island. With luck though from the altitude you could be looking down on the jagged rocky mountain peaks rising from an endless sea of clouds. Equally impressive at sunrise or sunset, it is a great location where we were indeed lucky.

In the north of the island, wreathed in fog and mystery is the Fanal Forest, one of the remaining ancient Laurel forests that once covered the whole island. Although the area is also known as the fog forest, it is isn’t a given that it will be foggy, in fact on my first visit this trip, before the workshop started, the sun beat down from a clear blue sky robbing the place of all it’s atmosphere and highlighting just how many tourists were there. At 1400m above sea level, the fog is actually low cloud (not that there is a difference other than the altitude) and as luck would have it, the day I had planned to visit the forest the clouds were just low enough to create the desired foggy atmosphere and hide most of the other tourists. We had a great afternoon, finding human shapes in the trees and trying not to get lost in the fog.

I’ll leave you with a gallery of additional photos from the trip, I hope you enjoy them, I’m already looking forward to planning more Madeira workshops next year so do let me know if you would like to join me.

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