Endless Gifts and a Welly Full of Water
Thursday brought another one of those evenings which reminded me that when it comes to this location, you can never have too much of a good thing. Every single low tide brings a different landscape with it and so often it's a case of trying to find that bit of foreground that leads to the distant focal point. Even when the sky is flat and featureless, as it was on Thursday evening, it doesn't really seem to matter - in fact a dose of cloud drama that so often makes the image here might even be a distraction when the lines in the sand are the most compelling (well hopefully you agree) feature in the image. I'm beginning to think of the place as the beach of endless gifts.
Lee and I had arrived relatively late, although we're already having sunset hour not long before 9pm. It seems funny to think that a couple of years ago we'd converge on almost exactly the same square yard - we still joke about this - and posting very similar images from an outing. As his specially sharpened elbows are famed in local five a side football circles, I'd inevitably lose the battle for the prime spot. At the moment I have little idea where he's got to of an evening out, somewhere up on the cliffs taking minimalist shots with his long lens as he is. Meanwhile my camera is at the opposite end of the focal length on tides like these; evenings when the wide angle lens, if it could speak would say to me "You don't need anything else tonight my old son. I'll do the job you need. You might need to do a focus stack, but it'll be worth the effort."
As so often happens here, I'd arrived with the intention of photographing another section of the beach entirely, but the clouds needed to make the reflections I'd planned on had vanished with the final hours of daylight. For a while I sat on the clifftop with Lee and talked about all things photographic as he trained his telephoto on surfers as they finished their sessions and carried their boards across the big patch of wet sand I'd been planning on using. As I watched, not for the first time recently the area of sand just to the right of the place where the Red River neatly dissects the beach as it makes its final journey to the sea came to my attention. From the clifftop I could see that there were promising patterns where a volume of seawater had escaped from a rock pool and made its way across the sand. Save for the distant inhabitant of a camping chair, nobody else was on this section of the beach and it seemed I might find a composition unsullied by human footprints.
I pretty much always wear my wellies here for low tide shots and I approached the scene via the river, intent on preserving the pristine landscape in front of me. Unfortunately I'd chosen the shorter wellies (so much easier for driving) and was rewarded for my oversight by a boot full of the Red River for my pains. To my right I could see a young lady was also wandering in the same direction, which hastened the camera out of the bag and onto the tripod. Fortunately she veered off across the centre of the beach and I could breathe and focus on the foreground options in front of me - there were lots of them at that. In fact this may not be the only shot I share here from the evening. In this one the beach seemed to be extending a sandy hand towards me at the very front of the frame. Mind you I feel like that every time I'm here.
It's not long now until the crowds arrive in our corner of the country and even at 9pm there will be plenty of people strolling across the scene you see here. Finding perfect sand without signs of humanity will become ever more challenging until the place is returned to us once more at the end of the summer. But that just means I'll move onto other compositions. There's always an image on this beach after all.
It's Sunday evening and another week at the grindstone awaits. I hope you have a good one.
Endless Gifts and a Welly Full of Water
Thursday brought another one of those evenings which reminded me that when it comes to this location, you can never have too much of a good thing. Every single low tide brings a different landscape with it and so often it's a case of trying to find that bit of foreground that leads to the distant focal point. Even when the sky is flat and featureless, as it was on Thursday evening, it doesn't really seem to matter - in fact a dose of cloud drama that so often makes the image here might even be a distraction when the lines in the sand are the most compelling (well hopefully you agree) feature in the image. I'm beginning to think of the place as the beach of endless gifts.
Lee and I had arrived relatively late, although we're already having sunset hour not long before 9pm. It seems funny to think that a couple of years ago we'd converge on almost exactly the same square yard - we still joke about this - and posting very similar images from an outing. As his specially sharpened elbows are famed in local five a side football circles, I'd inevitably lose the battle for the prime spot. At the moment I have little idea where he's got to of an evening out, somewhere up on the cliffs taking minimalist shots with his long lens as he is. Meanwhile my camera is at the opposite end of the focal length on tides like these; evenings when the wide angle lens, if it could speak would say to me "You don't need anything else tonight my old son. I'll do the job you need. You might need to do a focus stack, but it'll be worth the effort."
As so often happens here, I'd arrived with the intention of photographing another section of the beach entirely, but the clouds needed to make the reflections I'd planned on had vanished with the final hours of daylight. For a while I sat on the clifftop with Lee and talked about all things photographic as he trained his telephoto on surfers as they finished their sessions and carried their boards across the big patch of wet sand I'd been planning on using. As I watched, not for the first time recently the area of sand just to the right of the place where the Red River neatly dissects the beach as it makes its final journey to the sea came to my attention. From the clifftop I could see that there were promising patterns where a volume of seawater had escaped from a rock pool and made its way across the sand. Save for the distant inhabitant of a camping chair, nobody else was on this section of the beach and it seemed I might find a composition unsullied by human footprints.
I pretty much always wear my wellies here for low tide shots and I approached the scene via the river, intent on preserving the pristine landscape in front of me. Unfortunately I'd chosen the shorter wellies (so much easier for driving) and was rewarded for my oversight by a boot full of the Red River for my pains. To my right I could see a young lady was also wandering in the same direction, which hastened the camera out of the bag and onto the tripod. Fortunately she veered off across the centre of the beach and I could breathe and focus on the foreground options in front of me - there were lots of them at that. In fact this may not be the only shot I share here from the evening. In this one the beach seemed to be extending a sandy hand towards me at the very front of the frame. Mind you I feel like that every time I'm here.
It's not long now until the crowds arrive in our corner of the country and even at 9pm there will be plenty of people strolling across the scene you see here. Finding perfect sand without signs of humanity will become ever more challenging until the place is returned to us once more at the end of the summer. But that just means I'll move onto other compositions. There's always an image on this beach after all.
It's Sunday evening and another week at the grindstone awaits. I hope you have a good one.