Field Notes from a Quiet Coast

The fog never lifted, not once in seven days. By the third morning I stopped waiting for it and started photographing it instead.

The coast is a short drive from nowhere in particular. There is a car park, a row of shuttered beach huts and a path through the dunes that ends at a long grey shelf of pebbles. There is no coffee shop, which is the main reason I went. These are the notes I kept, lightly tidied. The spelling has been fixed. The mood has not.

Fig. 2. The sea from the green hut, with the one boat that went out all week. Drawing by Almanac.

Day one: the road in

Left at 6.40. Arrived 9.15, after the last village, Esham, where the road narrows and loses its white lines. Car park is gravel, pay and display, £3 for the day, coins only. I had £2.60. Left a note on the dashboard explaining. Nobody came to check, all week.

Kit:

• One camera.

• One lens, a 50mm.

• Ten rolls of expired film: Portra 400, expired 2014, bought as a lot of twelve from a man clearing out his late father’s chest freezer.

Two rolls had cracked canisters and went in the bin. Ten left, which is 360 frames if I’m careful, fewer if I’m not.

Note on the film, for my own benefit later. The rule I was taught is one extra stop of light for every ten years past the date. Being frozen slows the ageing, which argues for less. Not knowing whether the freezer stayed on for all twelve years argues for more. Decided to rate it at 200 instead of 400. Wrote 200 on a strip of tape on the back of the camera so I would not forget.

Walked the dune path. Twelve minutes to the pebbles. Fog sitting on the water like it had been there for years. Visibility maybe 80 metres. Counted the beach huts: fourteen, all shuttered, one painted a green that doesn’t look accidental. Shot nothing. Ate a cheese sandwich in the car with the engine off.

Evening. Room at a farm two miles back from Esham, £38 a night with breakfast at 7 sharp. Landlady, Mrs Tull, asked what I was photographing and, when I said fog, nodded as though that were a normal answer. Maybe here it is.

Day two: waiting for clear

Forecast said clearing by noon. It did not clear by noon. Sat on the pebbles from 10 until 1 with the camera in my lap, waiting for the horizon to come back. A man with a metal detector came past at about 11 and said, “Won’t lift today,” in the voice of someone who had been right about this before.

He was right. Shot half a roll anyway, mostly to feel useful. Expired film is unpredictable: colours drift, shadows fill with grain, and you never quite know what you have until it comes back from the lab.

Metering for fog

Plain-words note on the metering, because I had to work it out on the pebbles. A light meter assumes whatever it is pointed at is a middle grey. Point it at fog, which is a very bright grey, and it underexposes everything. The fix is to give it more light than it asks for, a stop and a half more, on top of the 200 rating. Wrote every exposure in pencil on the back of the forecast printout. If the negatives come back thin, I will at least know whose fault it was.

Metal detector man came back past at 1, heading the other way. Introduced himself as Gil. Retired, lives in Esham, comes down most days in the season and some days out of it. Over eleven years he has found, in his words:

A lot of ring pulls, a lot of nails and one half-crown from 1946.

Gil, metal detectorist, Esham

He asked what I was photographing. I said I wasn’t sure yet. He said that was about how he felt about the detecting.

Day three: photographing the fog

Woke at 5.50. Still fog. Something gave way, in a good sense. Stopped waiting for the clear day, which was not coming, and started treating the fog as the subject. In fog, the unpredictability of the film felt appropriate. Two uncertain things working together, or at least not working against each other.

Went out at first light. The beach huts at 7 in the morning are almost white. The green one is the only colour for half a mile. Shot it from forty paces, then sixty, then from so far away that it was just a mark. I suspect the sixty is the one.

Wrote this in the car, heater on full. Some places don’t want to be photographed clearly. The honest picture is the one that lets them stay a little hidden. Not sure I believe it yet. Writing it down to find out.

Some places don’t want to be photographed clearly. The honest picture is the one that lets them stay a little hidden.

Afternoon. Light went at about 3.30. In fog it does not fade from one side the way it does on a clear evening. It goes everywhere at once, like someone slowly turning down a dimmer in a room with no windows. Shot two frames at 1/30, handheld, braced against a hut. Probably soft. Stopped when the meter needle stopped moving.

Day four: rain

Rain all day, steady, from the west. Did not take the camera out of the bag. Drove back to Esham for supplies. One shop, which is also the post office, run by a woman who told me without being asked that the fog “comes in September and goes when it likes.” She asked if I was the one with the note on the dashboard. Word gets around in a village of about ninety houses.

Spent the afternoon in the car loading film and labelling canisters. Old film can curl and stick in the cold, so I wind each roll on slowly and watch the rewind knob turn as I advance. Learned that the hard way, years ago, with a whole roll of a friend’s wedding that turned out to be thirty-six pictures of nothing. Window steamed up. High water 4.12pm.

Evening. Mrs Tull lent me a book of local walks from 1983 with a pressed flower in it. The walk to the pebbles is described as “bracing.” Nothing about fog. Read it in bed. Rolls used: four.

Day five: almost nothing

Fog back, thicker than before. Most of today’s frames are of almost nothing. A post half-buried in shingle, black with tar, maybe an old groyne, maybe a mooring. A rowing boat turned upside down above the tideline, blue underneath, name painted out. Walked around it four times and took six frames. Possibly the best thing I shot all week, possibly not.

Note on the boat. The blue underneath was stronger in the viewfinder than anything else all week, which worries me slightly, because old film tends to lose its blues first. If the boat comes back green or grey I will not be surprised. Knelt on the pebbles for the low frames. Knees still wet at dinner.

Around 3pm, the outline of a figure walking a dog, maybe 50 metres off, coming out of the grey and going back into it. One frame. No time to focus properly. It will either be a person or a smudge on the negative. I’ll be fine with either.

Rolls used so far: six and a half. Flask of tea gone by 2.

Day six: the green hut

Found out about the green hut. A woman was opening it up at 10, the first open hut all week. Her name is Rosalind, she is in her seventies, and the hut has been in her family since 1962. Her father painted it that green because it was the colour of a boat he had as a boy, and every repaint since has had to match, which means taking a chip of the old paint to a merchant in town and asking them to mix it by eye. The rules say the huts should be white or cream. She has had three letters about it over the years. She keeps them pinned inside the door.

Asked if I could photograph her in the doorway. She said yes, if I didn’t make her smile. Inside: two deckchairs, a kettle on a gas ring, a framed photograph of the hut in sunshine that she says was taken in 1976. Shot four frames of her at f/4 and 1/60. She made tea. Did not ask to see the pictures, which was a relief, as there was nothing yet to see.

Late afternoon, a brief brightening, the closest the week came to clearing. Maybe ten minutes when the fog thinned and the sea showed a faint silver line a long way out. Shot it, because you have to. Then it closed again. Suspect those will be the least interesting frames of the week.

Day seven: the drive out

Last morning. Fog the same as the first day, which felt like a joke at my expense. Gil was on the pebbles, sweeping the detector back and forth, and raised a hand without looking up. Shot the last roll in the car park: the pay machine, the note still on my dashboard, my own footprints in the gravel. Packed up at 11. About twenty minutes inland it cleared completely. Blue sky. I could see wind turbines on the ridge behind the coast that I had not known were there. Did not stop.

Afterwards: the prints

Lab took nine days and charged £14 a roll. Two rolls came back with a magenta cast across everything, and I have kept them that way. Looking at the prints now, I realise they are closer to how the place felt than any clear day could have been. The fog did the editing. It removed the horizon, the distant wind turbines and the car park, and left only the small, close things that were actually there.

The sixty-pace frame of the green hut is the one, as I suspected on the day. The hut is a small dark mark slightly left of centre, and the fog around it has gone a pale warm grey with a faint pink in it that was not there in life. The green has shifted towards olive. Rosalind’s father would probably object. I have printed it twice, once small and once at 40 by 50 centimetres, and it works better small. Some pictures want to be held close, like a letter, and this is one of them.

The fog did the editing.

Technical notes, since people ask.

The 200 rating plus the extra for fog was about right: the negatives are dense, and the lab could pull them back. The magenta is the film’s own doing, its colour layers ageing at different speeds, and the lab offered to correct it. I said no. Of the four frames of Rosalind, one is sharp. She is not smiling. I posted her a print and she wrote back on a card with a lighthouse on it to say it was “very grey, and very like it.”

The figure with the dog came out. It is a person, just. These are the frames that survived. Grey, grainy and, I hope, quiet enough to hear.