Lighthouse foam
- 📍 Location: Ploumanac’h, Côte de Granit Rose, Brittany, France
- 📅 Date: 2023
Bright midday, clean blue sky, and water so clear over pale sand that the channels between the boulders had gone an almost tropical turquoise. That colour is the whole reason for the frame, and it only appears here on a rising tide with the sun high.
I framed horizontally with the granite filling the left and the bottom, and let the water cut a bright diagonal from the middle of the picture to the far rocks. The lighthouse sits small on the horizon line, closing the diagonal so the eye has somewhere to arrive.
A short exposure, deliberately. Everything else I make on this coast is long and smooth; here I wanted the foam to keep its edges and the swell to look like it is actually moving, because the picture is about energy rather than calm.
The colour contrast is almost unreasonable — orange-pink stone against that blue-green — and it is entirely natural. I have photographed this coast in every kind of weather, and on the two or three days a year when it looks like this, the only correct response is to stop arguing and take the picture.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
