Today we found ourselves with some time to participate in a CAS activity. In the recent weeks I have found myself doing a good amount of activity. In addition to this, it is a long weekend and I am lucky enough to be on the beach on Sri Lanka’s southern coastline. Therefore, I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to do some creativity. Due to the beautiful nature around ourselves, photography felt like the perfect thing to do.

My personal intrigue and interest in photography began around a year ago, during the Week Without Walls program of 2020. The trip that I went on was the Highlands trip, where we visited some of the most beautiful locations in central Sri Lanka. These places were Dambulla, the Knuckles Mountain Range, and Nuwara Eliya. That particular trip was centered around photography, and we all brought cameras along. We took pictures of the landscape, frogs, lizards, and every other piece of nature we saw along the way. Since this experience, I have been much more interested in photography, taking pictures in places such as Amman and the Dead Sea in Jordan, and Arugam Bay and Ella here in Sri Lanka.

I began in the garden, where I took a few photos of some of the more unique and colourful plants. Unfortunately, I was restricted to taking photos with my phone since I did not bring along the camera to the beach. The quality was quite good on most photos, but transferring them to the laptop seemed to hinder this quality.

After this I decided to go out to the beach and try to take some nice pictures there. I was lucky as there were multiple rock pools around, and they presented me with plenty of marine species to photograph, but I started with the sighting of a fisherman’s stilt. We could see turtles further in the distance, but they were extremely hard to snap as they only came to the surface momentarily to get air.

I then spotted a reddish coloured crab on the rocks, which did not move at all, making for an easier photograph. Jumping off the rocks, I then noticed a black crab on the move. Luckily, I was able to photograph it after it stopped on the sand. This was hard to photograph due to it’s constant movement. What was even harder to photograph however, were this particular species of tiny fish swimming around the little rock pools. Due to their peed and constant movement it was near impossible to get a good, close up picture of it. The only resulting image was the one below of the rocks. 

I found it extremely difficult to photograph many of the animal species that I saw due to the fact that most were continuously moving. In the future, I hope to continue more photography around Sri Lanka. And when it becomes possible, in other countries around the world. I have found that nature and animal species in particular are my favourite to document. I also need to ensure to have my camera on me more often, as the quality of the photography is much better than a phone.

LO2 Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process