Beach Towns pt. 6
Hello again!
If you’ve seen my recent posts, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been making a fair bit of progress with my beach towns project over the summer. The summertime is a really good time to gain some momentum with it, as the weather is hot, people are out at the beaches, and there are usually lots of subjects which can be ephemeral.
Since quite early on in my idea of the project, I’ve wanted to do a bit of a stint somewhere. This allows me both to justify a longer train ride, getting outside of the South-West Engerland/South Wales limitation I usually have, to spend early morning and evening time in and around the beach, and to just get loads of shooting done over a short period of time. The Thanet coast in Kent had been top of my list for a first go at this from, essentially, the very start. The ease of rail travel between a few destinations is a big big plus to me, and unfortunately it seems that there are not many areas I can do this to go to a few spots over a long weekend. Will have to do some brainstorming for another one, as I really enjoyed this one here.
Anyway, so over the bank holiday at the end of August, I went and stayed in Ramsgate, and ventured out from there to Broadstairs, Margate, and then stopped in Herne Bay on the way home.
As I arrived in Ramsgate, the weather was horrible. Hence, I didn’t get out for as long as I had potentially hoped, and the beach was all but empty. Fortunately, the rain cleared up, and there were some pockets of sunshine between the cloud, so I walked along the coast from there to Broadstairs and back, getting a few interesting photos along the way.
The next day, I went to Margate. This was, as anticipated, the real highlight of the trip. I took a lot of photos there. This probably now makes for my second busiest day of shooting, following my trip to Weymouth last summer. Big disappointment, though, that there was a light leak on one of my photos of The Flamingo - it was one of the ones I was most anticipating seeing. Margate is definitely one of the “nicer” beach towns, with a rather gentrified (or maybe just posh, I don’t know) old town and quite a lot of hipsters milling about. I am, obviously, one of those hipsters milling about, but because I’m on the other side of the camera, I don’t count.
On my last day, I then went to Herne Bay, before catching the train back home. I got quite a few photos, but I think I was starting to feel a bit fatigued by all the walking, so I was a bit impatient with some of the shots that I took. Generally speaking, as I reflect on this trip and the project so far, I do think I need to be a little more daring and a little more patient to get some more impactful street shots. However, the landscapes and less street-y documentary shots I think are working quite well.
As a little bonus, here are some photos I took on Dartmoor recently, as I finished off some rolls of film from my trip to Kent.
And here are the favourites. I’m going to limit this to my Kent shots, partly because I like all of the photos from Dartmoor, and partly just to help me with keeping an idea of what my best shots from the Beach Towns series are for when I come back to curate a final product of it in the future. Hope you enjoyed looking through these, and let me know which ones you like!
