Edin & Arita at Fanal Forest and Seixal Beach

Two locations in one evening. That was the plan Edin and Arita chose for their honeymoon session.

I picked them up in Funchal at five. By quarter past six we were standing on the Fanal plateau in fog thick enough to hide the next tree.

Fanal in the Afternoon

Fanal sits at 1,150 metres. It is colder and wetter than whatever Funchal is doing at the same hour, and the fog comes in off the north coast. That evening it came. Visibility was maybe forty metres.

Nobody can promise you this. Some days the cloud sits on the far ridge and never crosses the plateau. When it does cross, it works like a softbox the size of a forest.

They were dressed for the photographs, not for the ground. Her hem picked up mud inside the first ten minutes. She looked down at it once, decided it did not matter, and the session improved from that moment.

Some trunks here are hollow enough to stand inside. Roots come out of the ground. I do almost no posing in this place. I ask people to walk. If you want the practical details on the drive and the light, they are on the Fanal Forest location page.

We had fifty five minutes on the plateau. Then we went down to the sea.

Twenty Five Minutes to the Coast

Seixal is about twenty five minutes from Fanal down the north coast road. Fanal had them inside a cold wet cloud at 1,150 metres. Forty minutes later they were barefoot on warm black sand with the Atlantic in front and two hundred metres of cliff standing behind the beach.

They changed into linen and lace for this half. Sunset that day was at 20:33, and the cliffs at Seixal take the direct sun away well before that, so the beach was already in soft shade when we started. That is the usual pattern here. More on the light and the parking is on the Seixal Beach location page.

Blue Hour at Seixal Beach

The part I wanted most was the part after sunset. Most people pack up when the sun goes.

For roughly thirty minutes the sky holds a deep blue that a camera reads better than an eye does, the lights of the coast road come on across the bay, and the wet sand turns into a mirror. To get anything at that hour you need a slow shutter, and a slow shutter records movement. I asked them to run.

Those frames are not sharp. Two white shapes moving across black sand, the surf smeared into a single line, the village lights stretched into streaks.

We worked until the sky went out.

Booking an Evening Like This

This was a two hour session for two people, two locations, transport from Funchal included. The timing was built backwards from sunset: the beach needed the last hour of light plus the half hour after it, the drive took twenty five minutes, so Fanal got the slot before that.

Ask for both when you write, and ask early enough that the date is still open.

Details and prices are on the couples photography in Madeira page.