Druridge Bay

Back in July 2017, Radek Bajenski and I had a mad-dash 5-day trip to Northumberland to shoot last-minute brand photography for Funding Circle. One of our locations was Druridge Bay, a fantastic strip of white sand beach and lovely dunes that never seems to get that busy.

As we near our move from London to the north east, I’m anticipating all the great locations that will be more readily available to me again and Druridge Bay is one of them. 

We were there for Radek to photograph a couple of models for the Funding Circle brand re-launch, while I oversaw things from a design and layout point of view. We had pretty glorious weather and while clear blue skies aren’t often a landscape photographer’s friend, they worked just fine for the brand images we needed.

I had my Fujifilm X-Pro2 with the Voigtländer Nokton 50mm 1.5 lens attached, using it largely to help frame and visualise shots for Radek to take properly, and so I could scout ahead a little while he photographed the models. In amongst that, I of course got took a few photographs of scenes that interested me personally, including this hand-held pano comprising 10 portrait-oriented frames. 

I shot either wide-open or close to wide-open from memory, and the combination of the 75mm equivalent focal length, shallow depth of field and wide field of view from the panorama helps give a strong 3D depth to the image I think. It's effectively a ‘Brenizer method’ image, but where the subject is a sand dune.