incident on porthminster beach

It was a few years ago, when I was shooting in film, with my dad's Pentax - something I'm going to start doing again, I decided, because I love the quality. With film, you're more.. careful. You don't take a zillion photos. You choose when to press the shutter.

And you don't get the results til much later. When you're somewhere else. When the moment is gone.

We were on the beach near St. Ives, Cornwall - Porthminster Beach. It was my birthday - mid September, and it was that last glorious few minutes of sun on the beach, on the last sunny Indian summer day. Our first day of holiday, but the next would turn cold and dark and wet, and have their own beautiful light. But this day - it was like that line, 'made glorious summer.'

Later, I started playing with the image - zooming in and in, trying to imagine the story behind these people I never knew. Late at night, one night, I started thinking about how much you can read into a moment, frozen in time.

Below is the triptych of this image, and at the bottom, the original photo. Which, at when you look at it from a distance, isn't particularly interesting, or even a very good photo.

My husband just glanced over, as I was typing, and asked if that was a photo I've taken. 'Yeah,' I said, and kept on typing. 'The colours are fucked up,' he said, and went on reading.