Chasing the Light at Reculver Towers

Returning to a familiar location, struggling to make it work, and finally coming home with the photograph I had been looking for.

There are some locations that seem as though they should be easy to photograph.

Reculver Towers photography has always been more challenging for me than the location initially suggests.

The two towers dominate this stretch of the Kent coast and, on paper, everything is there: an unmistakable subject, an open horizon, changing tides and a coastline that can look completely different depending on the weather.

And yet, every time I have photographed Reculver, I have struggled to come away with an image that really satisfies me.

Until this evening.

Returning to a Difficult Location

I think one of the most useful lessons in landscape photography is accepting that simply visiting a beautiful place doesn't guarantee a good photograph.

Sometimes the conditions are wrong. Sometimes the composition doesn't quite work. And sometimes you can see the potential of a location but can't yet work out how to translate it into an image.

Reculver has been like that for me.

I have photographed the towers before, but there was always something missing. So rather than writing the location off, I kept it in the back of my mind and waited for another opportunity.

This time, the combination of the tide, clouds and evening light finally started to bring everything together.

Getting Down onto the Shoreline

As the tide retreated, the foreground completely changed.

Large areas of the shoreline became exposed, leaving mud, rock and shallow pools of water. Those pools were exactly what I had been looking for.

Instead of simply photographing the towers against the sunset, I could use the shapes and reflections in the foreground to create depth and lead the eye through the photograph towards Reculver.

It also meant getting low and moving around until the pieces started to fit together.

And this is where the less glamorous side of landscape photography made an appearance.

The shoreline was wet, muddy and awkward underfoot. Appropriate footwear is essential here, but even decent boots weren't enough to save me completely. At one point I managed to step onto a piece of metal wire hidden on the ground, which went straight through my boot and into my foot.

Not quite the photographic technique I would recommend practising.

It was also a good reminder that when you're concentrating on the viewfinder, it is very easy to stop paying enough attention to what's immediately around your feet.

When Everything Finally Comes Together

As sunset approached, the sky began developing exactly the sort of structure I had hoped for.

The warmer colours around the horizon contrasted beautifully with the cooler blues overhead, while the movement in the clouds seemed to radiate out across the frame.

Down on the shoreline, the remaining pools caught those colours.

That was the moment when the location finally made sense to me photographically.

The towers didn't need to dominate the frame. Instead, I could place them to one side and allow the foreground and enormous sky to become equally important parts of the composition.

After several attempts at photographing Reculver over time, I finally felt I had made the image I had been looking for.

It's now my favourite photograph I've taken at Reculver and one I'm happy to include in my portfolio.

Why I Bracket Exposures at Sunset

There was another challenge, though.

Scenes like this contain an enormous amount of contrast.

The area immediately around the setting sun can be extremely bright, while the foreground and Reculver Towers can already be several stops darker. Expose for the foreground and there's a risk of losing detail around the sun. Expose for the highlights and the foreground can become unnecessarily dark.

This is exactly the situation where I find exposure bracketing useful.

Rather than relying entirely on one exposure, I take several photographs without changing the composition, varying the exposure between them. One protects the brightest parts of the sky, another captures the midtones, and a brighter frame gives me cleaner information in the darker areas.

Later, I can blend those exposures carefully.

The important word there is carefully.

For me, bracketing isn't about creating an obvious HDR effect. It's simply a way of overcoming some of the limitations of the camera and giving myself enough information to recreate the balance of light that made me stop and photograph the scene in the first place.

A tripod also becomes particularly valuable because keeping every exposure perfectly aligned makes the blending process much easier.

One Last Image Before the Light Fades

Eventually you reach that familiar point in every sunset shoot.

The colour starts disappearing. Exposure times get longer. You know you're almost finished.

And inevitably you tell yourself:

One last photograph.

I moved lower onto the exposed shoreline for a final composition.

By now, Reculver Towers were almost completely in silhouette. The remaining warmth was concentrated along the horizon, reflected in the pools left behind by the tide, while the textured clouds stretched across an increasingly blue sky.

The light didn't last much longer.

And then it was gone.

Looking back at the photographs afterwards, that final sequence felt like the right way to finish the evening.

There is something particularly satisfying about finally making an image from a place that has resisted you for a long time. It would have been easy after previous visits to decide that Reculver simply wasn't a location that worked for me.

Instead, I went back.

Different tide. Different weather. Different light. A slightly different way of seeing the place.

And eventually, it worked.

Keep Going Back

Perhaps that's the biggest lesson I took from this evening.

Landscape photography isn't always about discovering somewhere new.

Sometimes the better photograph comes from returning somewhere familiar with a little more experience than you had the last time.

You begin noticing different foregrounds. You understand where the light will fall. You recognise which conditions might suit the location. And compositions that weren't obvious before suddenly start appearing.

Reculver made me work for this one.

That probably makes the photograph mean a little more to me.