Andrew Campbell
Andrew (Andi) Campbell is a landscape photographer based in the South West of the UK. His passion for photography is based around capturing wonderful landscape images how he sees them, and teaching others how to achieve the same. He offers both 1-to-1 and group workshops in the South West of England and further afield. Visit andrewcampbell.co.uk
It’s about 2am in the middle of May 2021 and Andi Campbell is framing an image of Start Point lighthouse under a sky full of bright, beautiful stars. Astronomical twilight, the last phase of illumination in the sky, ended two hours ago, plunging these cliffs into the deepest darkness and its first glimmers won’t reach over the eastern horizon for another 40 minutes. Dawn itself is three hours distant. This is truly the dead of night.
Above him, the Milky Way makes its slow grand spin through the sky, echoed by the lighthouse beam as it circles out to sea. Just a stone’s throw from the South West Coast path in Devon’s South Hams, by day this is a popular attraction, and at night, as you’d expect, deserted. But not entirely.
‘One of the things I enjoy about astrophotography is the solitude,’ says Andi, ‘but at times being alone in the dark can play tricks on you. You can’t get away from all those myths you were taught as a kid. So, when I’m on Dartmoor, something in the back of my head will have me thinking of ‘the Hairy Hands’ or the ‘Beast’. But the only time I have ever been really caught out was on that night at Start Point – and it
