Guarding the beach at Newquay

I’ve had this image ready, waiting to share for a couple of years now and it has stayed a favourite in my library so it seems about time to put it out there.

As with my other recently-shared image of fishing boats at Newquay, this was taken on a long-weekend trip for a friend’s birthday back in 2018.

It’s odd: I didn’t come away from the trip thinking Newquay was overly photogenic and yet I got a handful of images I really enjoy still, to this day.

This view down from the cliffs across the beach was taken on an evening wander into town for dinner. As with the fishing boat image, I had the Asahi-Pentax Super Takumar 28mm ƒ/3.5 lens mounted on my Fujifilm X-Pro2.

I made the conversion to black & white pretty quickly with this image: the low contrast of the haze with the higher contrast mid-ground cliff and RNLI truck in the foreground just work really nicely in monochrome.

I like that the RNLI truck is pointing well enough into the scene to lead the eye, after probably being the first thing you look at thanks to its brightness.

Coming back to the image a couple of years later, it’s a rare one where I still don’t feel much urge to change anything in the processing. I think it gives that sense of a hazy day with just enough sunlight still coming through to pick out the odd element in a brighter contrast.

Being picky, the white apartment block at the top right in the far distance is a little distracting once you notice it, especially against the building on the edge of the mid-ground cliff right below it in the frame.

Otherwise, I still like the composition. The RNLI vehicles on the smooth sand below, with just a few nicely scattered beach goers; the cliff dividing the next section of beach round where you can pick out a whole group of surfers in the sea and the shoreline continuing to curve round to the top left where the haze nicely softens everything out.