Aerial

From a hundred metres up, this coastline makes a completely different kind of sense, and the first time I saw it from the air, I felt cheated about all the years I'd spent looking at it from the sand. You see the rock platform as one continuous shelf, running under the beaches and out to the headlands, with the pools sitting in it like shapes somebody has stamped out. And on a clear morning the rips show up as darker blue channels, cutting straight out through the break, which you'll never quite unsee once you've noticed it.

The rules shape these pictures more than you'd think, which is worth saying out loud. In Australia you stay under a hundred and twenty metres, you keep the aircraft in sight, and you don't fly over people, and that last one means early starts (five o'clock early, not eight). So I'm up before the first swimmers arrive, which happily turns out to be when the water's cleanest, and the sun's still low enough to throw the headlands right across the sand.

Between May and November there are humpbacks going past, something like forty thousand of them making the run up the east coast and back again, and on the southern leg the mothers and calves come in close to the headlands. But from the air you get the whole animal at once, instead of a fin and a bit of splash. I don't think I'll ever get bored of it, honestly.

There are only five frames here, and I'd rather tell you why than pad it out. Most of what I bring back from the air is a survey, rather than a photograph, all information and no feeling, and it goes straight in the bin. These five are the ones where the geometry did something I could never have found on the ground, with my feet in a rock pool.