Breaking Day
Challenged to make a list of the Top 10 qualities of landscape photography, up there approaching the summit would be its unique ability to capture a moment. An alignment of light, weather and season never repeated.
Braced against a blunt North Sea wind, I was at Northumberland's Embleton Bay an hour before a mid-April sunrise. My recce completed the afternoon before, I knew where the sun would rise, the task was to find shape and structure around which to build an image. The tide had just turned, retreating fast. In the not-quite-dawn light details slowly leafed from the darkness and I could make out a channel of tide-sculptured sand luring my eye to where the sun would rise. A dense curtain of cloud pushed down on the horizon, but often the sun can peel clouds apart as it climbs.
Then, just as the light level began to rise, those two Craster kippers I had sacrificed to the weather gods the day before started to work. With a numb but patient finger on my cable release, the clouds began to separate and a magical alignment of light, weather and time was revealed. The Decisive Moment.