Simple Photography Tips for You - how to take photo-art - sand, water & light

Five tips on creating artistic images of water ripples over sand

• Choose your patch of sand to get the best background composition

• Observe the way the water flows, and adjust your position to make the images 'work'

• Think about balance of light and dark zones

• Be aware of the burn-out effects of too much sunlight, pointing into the sun can cause huge overexposure

• Experiment!

Wherever you are in the world, where there is coastline that you can gain access to, here are some simple photography tips to help you get some wonderful artistic photographs using your camera, or phone-camera to be creative.

Creativity itself sort of has very few boundaries, it benefits from an observant eye, but although for some that comes naturally, I believe it can also be learnt, and is improved by practise.

What you do with your creativity is a matter of opportunity, and being adventurous.

So today I want to introduce you to a quirky thing that has endless possibilities - looking, seeing, watching AND making art, and you can do it barefoot if you wish! (beware of paddling in sand pools - Great & Lesser weever Fish - Echiichthys vipera, which hide, half submerged in the sand, have dorsal fins which can pump poison into you - painful! I can tell you from being 'got')

I'm going to give you a little link here to a great bit of kit https://amzn.to/4jpttzY. We've had and used these for a couple of decades. It's apparently used by some of the worlds' special forces in dealing with bites and stings received from some of the worlds' bitey stingers. Called an Aspivenin, my daughters', who travel a lot, often carry one with them as well. Basically it can be used to suck out the poison from bites and stings, and I've found it effective on dealing with weaver fish stings, wasps and other unfriendly bugs and beasties. (This is an affiliate link, so I might earn some money if you make a purchase, which will help support the creation of these blogs - so thank you! Think of it as a way to fund my caffeine addiction while I keep you safe from venomous creatures and bad puns.)

Image One - tide over sand

So here you are wandering across the beach, and little waves are flowing in across the sand, then sucking out again. There are places where it has been doing this for a while, and little ripples in the sand have formed, and smooth patches as well.

There are no rights or wrongs, but some images work better than others, and the scene is constantly changing, and I mean constantly. Let's have a look at a few I took the other day on my iphone 14.

In all these images I've positioned myself so that the flow is from the bottom,

Image One shows such a scene, with the light and sand-forms creating a picture you'd be proud to paint. If like me, you don't have that skill, then take photographs.

Image Two - tide over sand. with sunlight

Image Two, to my mind captures and freezes the movement, and light in a most enigmatic way. I tried to make use of some of the 'rules' of composition, successfully in part - one of the main focal points sits on the top right intersecting third. Ideally I would have had the ripple towards the bottom, sitting on the lowest third, but the wavelength prevented that.

Image Three - tide over sand. without sunlight

Image Three has a lot going on, and is perhaps too busy for some of you. It's certainly one of those images where you benefit from looking until you see. Coming back to it to do another edit, I'm seeing all sorts of fascinating patterns I'd not noticed until now.

Image Four - tide over sand. with sunlight

Image Four and Image Five are great examples of the idiom that nothing stays the same. When photographing ripples of water over sand, each and every moment is different, and none ever the same. What you capture mow can never be repeated.

The light changes, grains of sand and seashells, debris, carried forwards and backwards. Each shell affects the flow and form of the water, each sand ripple does the same, and that changes the way the light can reflect..

Image Five - tide over sand. without sunlight

If anything I prefer Image Five, simply because there is a sense of pulsing light as the ripple appears from the bottom of the picture, bigger, more powerful, and carrying freshness.

In terms of simple photography tips, I'd say, choose your background, in the case of Three and Four, I selected a smooth unruffled area at the top, and ripples of sand for the rest. Take lots of images, and see how they pan out. And maybe do a poster sized print.

Happy paddling.

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