5am at the coast

 I'd been making a point to shoot more this year, considering how few photoshoots I had been on last year, so when my friend Syahin asked me if I could take photos of him a while ago, I kept his name in mind. 

It has been a whirlwind of a year. A small one, actually, but it was (is?) my final year at university and we had important projects to complete. Time was slowly freed up the past few weeks and I really wanted to do something creative, so I contacted Syahin and we planned for a shoot. 

It doesn't seem too bizarre to me until I tell it to others the things I would do for photos, and this was about the same. Syahin has a car and offered to drive me to wherever I wanted to go for the photos. I was dying to see a beach and the sea, so when I came across this place called Helen's Bay that was a coastal area yet not too far off from where we lived, I suggested that we go there -as well as try to catch the sunrise which happened to be at 5am. 

You know he/she is a pretty cool person when they say yes to your crazy ideas. 

So we both woke up before 5 and he drove with the guidance of a gps, only for us to end up in the middle of a street in a residential area. Not having any other choice, we wandered about until we found a path that appeared to lead down to the beach. 

We did not arrive at the beach immediately, but instead found ourselves at a fork in the path amidst the small woodland-looking area, and taking one down brought us to a very rocky coast. There must've been other people who had visited that area before, despite it being still and empty when we were there which was most likely due to the time of day. I discovered a trodden path between the grass and boulders and made my way carefully down it. 

I am pretty sure I had always only shot girls before this, therefore, this would be my first real shoot with a guy. It was a pretty fun shoot, nevertheless, with me asking him to climb on rocks and lie among flowers that were way too pretty to resist. 

The sun that I had hoped for never really surfaced as it turned out to be a cloudy day, but I made do with what I had. 

 Towards the end, we found the beach but it was at the bottom of a very steep slope. We contemplated going down, and ended up doing so because we were already there anyway. I made my way down the steep slope just fine, but then slipped on some moss when I climbed onto a low rock to be able to shoot from a higher angle. The fall drew a line in my tights and scraped just the teeniest bit of my knee, but I was more worried about the slight thud I heard from my camera and did not even noticed that I was scratched until Syahin pointed it out. But what's a tiny scratch compared to an adventure anyway?