Wintry weather in Chicago and Porthcawl
Recent days have seen the news full of extreme weather images, many taken from Porthcawl in Britain, and Chicago in the United States.
Chicago is currently suffering from freakishly freezing temperatures. When I visited around this time three years ago, it was the coldest I’d known a big city to be. Icebergs were liberally scattered across Lake Michigan, snow lay fairly deep by British standards, and it stayed cold and snowy everywhere I went during a later road-trip into Wisconsin. Right now it’s reportedly much worse.
Not one to pass-up an opportunity to show off tenuously relevant images, here’s a few from that trip to the famously windy, and at that time wintry city.
Porthcawl is a favoured ‘go-to’ place for stormy pictures back in Britain. The seaside town in south Wales is just along the coast from Cardiff, and not far off the main M4 motorway connecting Wales to London. Countless UK newspaper front-pages have been illustrated with an image of waves booming over the Porthcawl lighthouse and pier.
It’s not hard to imagine many picture editors ordering hardy photographers out to Porthcawl to get a spectacular shot of some waves, as a guy from the Press Association did this week with major success. Hours, possibly even minutes after he pressed his shutter, the image was on the BBC News homepage and being shared widely across all sorts of platforms.
It shows epic waves showering the pier and lighthouse, as a clutch of observers stand precariously underneath. Their proximity to the waves might be a trick of long lens perspective.
I’ve taken one or two trips down to Porthcawl in the past, my most fruitful visit being two years ago, around early December. The place was very quiet, cold and windy as ever, but still had a bleak romance about it.
Here are a couple from back then. The front often draws people down to stand and stare at the wild sea, and not just when the tide swells are record-breakingly high.
