Out and About: Exmouth

This image was taken on a glorious November day in Exmouth, Devon. The temperature was unbelievably warm at 18 degrees. I was walking along the beach in a tee-shirt and I was still very warm.

Being November, the area did not have the summer quota of holiday-makers and the beach was virtually empty apart from a few people walking their dogs and enjoying the bizarre weather.

As you can see from the image the sun was quite low in the sky even though the time was eleven o’clock in the morning and it reflected gloriously off the sea. The clouds were fabulous and added extra depth to the scene. All I needed to get was a bit of foreground interest and that eventually came along in the form of two individuals walking towards me along the sea edge.

There were some buildings on the far left which unbalanced the composition and so I went for a square crop and excluded them. This left the scene centred on the two people on the beach. It was lucky that the people were easily discernible as male and female as this helped start a dialogue in my mind and the static appearance of the woman at the back and the walking attitude of the man gave me the title ‘Leaving’.

The photograph was taken on a Fujifilm X-T1 and an XF 18-135mm, f/3.5 – 5.6 LM OIS WR lens. ISO was 320 at 1/800sec and the aperture was set at f/18.0. I used this very small aperture despite the risks of diffraction as I wanted the sun to split into a start shape.