A wide beach, a calm sea and one boat under a tarpaulin, pulled up well above the tide line and waiting for somebody to need it.
Beaches this empty are mostly a question of timing rather than geography. This one has a car park and a cafe about two hundred metres behind me, and by eleven it was a different place entirely.
Three bands and an object
Compositionally there is not much to it: sand, sea, sky, and one thing to look at. That is a formula rather than an insight, but formulas exist because they work, and the reason this one works is that the eye needs somewhere to land after it has finished reading the stripes.
- Put the object off-centre, but not so far that it looks like an accident.
- Give the sand more room than the sky unless the sky is doing something.
- Keep the horizon straight. Everything else is forgivable and that is not.
- Shoot before the footprints arrive.
The tarpaulin is the detail that makes it a working beach rather than a postcard. Somebody covers that boat, uncovers it, and covers it again, and has done for years.
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