Sandy waves
- 📍 Location: Cap Blanc-Nez, Escalles, Côte d’Opale, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
The tide had gone out over a shallow beach and left the sand ribbed in long parallel ridges, each trough still holding a film of water. Every one of those films was returning the sky, so the ground had become a series of bright lines running towards the cape.
I got the camera down to within a few centimetres of the sand. From standing height the ripples are a texture; from down there they are a structure, and they lead the eye across the whole frame to the chalk headland on the right.
The colours are almost entirely borrowed. The sand is grey-brown and contributes nothing; what you see is the pink and pale blue of the sky, lying in the water and repeated a hundred times. I kept the treatment soft so that borrowed quality stays obvious.
Low tide here uncovers several hundred metres of beach and rewrites the pattern every twelve hours. Nothing in this photograph existed the day before or the day after, which is, when I think about it, true of most of what I do.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
