Inspired #8

Using detail to tell stories.

Hello and welcome to Inspired, a weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.

This week for my ‘inspired’ post I wanted to talk about using detail to tell stories. and I think this exercise would be a great way to add an extra dimension to the monthly challenge - working with detail and intimate landscapes.

Firstly I wanted to find a place in my local area that I could use to create a mini project. I wanted somewhere with an interesting story that would allow me to photograph, process and present a body of work in half a day. In the end I chose my local beach which is a wild and windswept place situated at the mouth of the River Ore and overlooking the longest shingle spit in Europe.

Unusually for a beach on the east coast this one has grown in size since I began photographing it 18 years ago. It is now much deeper as more and more shingle gets deposited along the shoreline. Running across this vast expanse of shingle is a line of white shells stretching from the coastguard cottages at the back of the beach to the distant sea. The line is an unexpected addition to this wild place and has been a feature here for as long as I can remember. Created by two friends in times of illness when the beach became a place of healing and the line a symbol of their journey. It is tended regularly and morphs and changes with the passing of time as transient as the beach upon which it sits. Stories of man and nature intertwined in a testament to life and friendship.

I decided this was the perfect subject for this weeks post. It has an interesting story behind it and I felt it had lots of options for detail shots. My idea was to create a panel of 9 images that portrayed how I see this subject. This is purely my interpretation but I wanted to share my thought process, how I made the images and how I presented them afterwards. All together this project took me about 4 hours to complete - 2 hours making the images and another 2 to process and present them.