Prior’s Haven

As the wind and rain whip outside my window, here is an image from a much calmer day in August last year.

I was still spending lockdown mornings looking after the kids and with a hot summer, we spent a lot of time at the local beach. For a slight change of scene this day, we ventured a little further down the coast to Prior’s Haven in Tynemouth, finding beautiful still waters within the river piers.

While the boys explored the tiny beach I took the opportunity to try and capture the gently-rippling water and the twin lighthouses at the river mouth with my Fuji GFX 50R and the Leica Summicron-R 50mm F2 lens.

It was a lovely little scene, with a mild haze in the air of an otherwise bright blue sky and the seagulls circling for an added bit of interest. The almost idyllic picture is interrupted a little once you spot the bottle floating in the water just left-of-centre—and I didn’t notice it at the time—though it felt wrong to try and remove it in post.

I took a few other frames from roughly the same position (it’s really not a big beach), including this pano-cropped frame focusing more on the haze-faded piers in the distance and black rocks in the mid-ground.