Rockless Beach?

A warm summer's evening and I arrive at Rocky Bay full of hope for some great compositions and stunning light, the first challenge that quickly became apparent was.. there were no rocks !!

Normally a collection of great rock pools and fantastically textured rocks can always deliver a different shot. Today was going to be no different, albeit without any rock pools or textured rocks. Instead, I stood there watching the waves as they came ashore, hit this newly formed sand bank and then gently finished their long journey at my feet below. This is one of the great things about this location, it is like that box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. Today I also had the advantage of what seemed like the only swell along the coast, and after meeting a surfer he conferred that this was the case indeed, everywhere else was flat calm. So it was time to embrace it and see what I could capture on this funny evening at the rockless beach.

I had planned to visit for sunset and also high tide, I was expecting to find many different compositions, but now I had a different challenge for sure, no foregrounds to find but instead, a newly formed sandbank, which would most likely be gone within a couple of turns of the tide again, so I set out to find something different and make the most of the conditions I had.

The breaking waves were powerful but weren’t going to pose any risk for me other than the potential of getting stranded on the sand bank, as the water swirled around behind me, what it did do was offer me some fantastic reflections on the sand as it was soaked by the wave before once again returning to normal sand once more.

This also allowed me to see some interesting shapes in the sand as the water formed fantastic and unique textures after each wave. All I needed was the light now, and the bank of clouds that I had planned to catch light started to follow the plan, however, it seems that some clouds on the western horizon had different plans and soon the colour potential was gone. Nonetheless, the subtle light gave a sort of pastel colour palette to the scene and I was happy with the shots I was seeing on the back of the camera.

It wasn’t until I returned to the van I could see that the light blocker didn’t look like it was clouded, it has more of a haze from it, perhaps something to do with the Canadian Forest Fires I thought.

You can see the images I managed to capture in the gallery below or watch the adventure on the Youtube video from Sunday at 5 pm