Towards the end of last week, some very high winds came through and gave southern England a battering. I took myself off to Dover to photograph the interaction of wind with the sea. The wind was against the tide, so huge plumes of spray were being whipped up.
There is a shingle beach near the cruise terminal pier. Going on to the shingle, I felt like I had been hit by a hurricane. Salt spray was in the air, and flying sand was in my face. I tried to stand up to take pictures, but in the end, had to resort to sitting on the shingle bank.
Herring gull surfs the wind
I had just taken my 500mm lens because I wanted to capture the explosion of waves and spray as energy bounced from the wind to the pier and around the shallow sea. That turned out to be quite a good choice as it would have been unsafe to go down to the bottom of the shingle bank to the water's edge. I'd originally wanted to do just that, to get the peaks of the waves as they lashed into the sky. But the conditions were such that I wasn't prepared to risk getting caught in an unexpected wave.
The wind was so strong, I found it hard to think, much less carefully frame anything. A 500mm lens with a large lens hood behaves like a sail in the wind, making it hard to aim straight. After 45 minutes, I'd had more than enough, and packed up. Nevertheless, I'm extremely pleased with some of the pictures here that capture my feelings about the experience.
The pictures I like best are the opening and closing pair: they have much wider fields of view than I had anticipated using, but I think the state of the whole sea comes through. They make me think of the storms that Turner must have seen that inspired his paintings of ships caught in storms off the Kent coast.