I’m lucky enough to live less than five minutes' walk from a stunning beach. I know pebble and shingle beaches get a bad rep, but this sort of shingle beach really becomes epically beautiful when summer hits, and the beach flora comes to life.
Enjoying a Tom Foolery coffee while catching up on e-mail and feeds on this beautiful morning…
[gallery ids=“3371,3370,3367,3369,3368”]
Summer finally hit the south coast over the weekend, and I was fortunate enough to spend a good section of my three day weekend with my daughter on the beach. Friday was a quiet day, as you might expect, with Hazel enjoying exploring the abundant plant life that grows on Shoreham Beach’s rare shingle habitat.
By Sunday, the little one was quite surprised when she toddled onto the beach. She’s used to us having it largely to ourselves, bar a few dog walkers (“doggies!"), and the beach, while not packed, was certainly busy. Quite a few of the visitors had decided to take advantage of the weather by stripping off to shorts to swimwear, which led to a lot of pointing and cries of “rudie nudie!” from the little one. Toddlers lack social graces, it appears.
Still, an idyllic couple of hours, exploring the Beach, throwing pebbles into the water and watching the boats go by. While pointing out the “rudie nudies”, of course.
The beginning of summer beings blooms into life on Shoreham Beach’s shingle beach habitat.
[gallery columns=“1” ids=“3320,3321,3317,3318,3319”]
Two mornings a week, I walk over the Adur Ferry Bridge to take my little girl to nursery. And then, in the late afternoon, I do the same again.
Sometimes the views are just stunning. Here’s my favourite five images from the walk this month…
High tide on the Adur from Emerald Quay
A homeowner.
A dad.
Doing the lawn on a Sunday afternoon, while my daughter plays on a blanket.
I’m middle-aged.
I’m happy.
Dramatic light on Shoreham Beach
My sense of time is slipping, sucked away by a baby’s obliviousness to such things. Being self-employed is great. If I was still a corporate type, I'd be back at work by now, not spending time with my daughter, while getting work done at home. But it has its issues. Like my daughter and my wife, I no longer have a clear idea of what day of the week it is. For example, yesterday I decided I really needed a haircut, and made my first baby-free expedition out of the house this week. I strolled across the footbridge, stopped off at the patisserie for a treat, and arrived at my barber.
Oh. Wednesday. They're shut on Wednesday. Still. Can't waste the trip.
Coffee in Hector's Shed. They do a mean Americano in there. And the walk was good for me, right?
I was out of the house at 6am on Tuesday, to hit the FT Mobile event. The Adur was so beautifully stil in the early morning light, that I couldn’t resist grabbing some photos.
A weekend walk along Shoreham Beach threw up this melancholy sight. Dozens of starfish on the beach, amongst empty mussels shells, and the remains of filleted fish. Personally, I suspect that the lot were thrown over the side of a boat and washed ashore on the beach.
Fantastically unseasonal sun in Shoreham over the weekend:
It's the walk home that keeps on giving.
I spent last Friday at dConstruct, a conference held just down the coast in Brifghton. As I walked home from Shoreham station, the mist was just beginning to descend over the Adur, as the evening light turned orange. The quality of light that resulted was just breathtaking. Luckily, I had my DSLR with me, from my conference liveblogging, and I grabbed a few images before the light passed:
Such a lovely part of the world to come home to.
Despite the dire warnings of rain and general unpleasantness, today dawned bright and fine in Shoreham-by-Sea, which must have been a great relief to the organisers of the airshow. Sadly, we were too busy to attend this year, but we were treated to a free show as we walked from the Beach over to the town this afternoon:
[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/27949766](http://www.vimeo.com/27949766) w=530&h=298]
Sorry for the very amateur hour footage. Pointing a small caera at the sky and getting decent results is harder than I imagined… My respect for my FlightGlobal colleagues goes up.
One of my favourite features of Shoreham Beach is its plant life. As barren as it looks in winter, come the spring it burts into a riot of colour and life. I missed the best of it this year, but I thought even the fading beauty of early summer was worth recording:
[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/26971752](http://www.vimeo.com/26971752) w=550&h=309]
[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/26844743](http://www.vimeo.com/26844743) w=525&h=295]
[vimeo 21343360 w=500 h=375]
A quiet moment to destress your afternoon.
[vimeo 20994464 w=521 h=293]
Another little project for myself: shoot short vignettes capturing the feel or an aspect of a day in under 30 seconds. This was yesterday’s.
Wonder how long this one will last? :-)
The original idea was to have these as "motion photographs" and post them to Flickr. And then I remembered that Flickr hasn't yet got its act together to provide iPad and iPhone compatible video yet, so I went with Vimeo instead.
Another photo from the most recent roll of film I shot. The film grain really enhances the effect of this image, I think.
A while ago, I started a project I called Film Finis. The idea was to use up all the remaining photographic film I had, enoy myself while doing so, and then switch to an all-digital future. I kinda got side-tracked with other things over the last six months, but finally, I'm going on it again. The image above is from a film I shot over a couple of weekends around Shoreham-by-Sea. In fact, it was shot on the very same walk that produced these images.
And…it is fun. It's really strange now not being able to look at the image after I've taken it; to just trust that the image has been captured. And it makes you more of a sniper - you pick and choose which images to take, rather than scattershotting, knowing you can delete anything that doesn't come up to scratch later. It's good discipline, which I need to bring back to my digital photography.
The sun finally struggled out again today, bathing Shoreham-by-sea in a warm light that belied the cold breeze still in the air. Chilly? Yes. But not enough to stop me taking a long walk around the beach this afternoon:
Dropped the car off for a service this morning, and walked into Shoreham through mist-enshrouded street. Photo opp? Oh, yes.
I had a small accident on Wednesday evening. A small accident that left the glass on the top of my iPhone shattered, the screen non-functional but, as far as I could tell, the phone itself working. I checked a couple of local places that did repairs, and grabbed a couple of hours out today to go get the phone repaired.
The guy who was open was a very small business, operating out of his front room, in effect:
I turned up at exactly the same time as another guy, who had a problem with a self-installed third party replacement battery. The repairer suggested that we both return in an hour, giving me time to snag a much-needed haircut.
And sure enough, exactly an hour later my iPhone was back to normal. And that gave me the chance to play with my beloved Instagram app in the snowly weather on the way home:
I may, at some point, get bored of these photo effect apps. But I'm not showing any signs just yet.
