Newport

Newport is the one I kept driving past. There are sixteen or so beaches on this peninsula and photographers have their favourites, the ones that show up on every feed, and for whatever reason this was never one of them. Which is how I came to be standing here on my own the morning the sky went up like a furnace, with nobody to share the disbelief with.

It sits between headlands, and the sand curves enough that when the light arrives low off the water it runs the length of the beach and keeps going. A line of Norfolk pines along the front catches colour before anything else does, houses step up the hill behind them, and down in the shallows the remains of an old concrete structure take the tide twice a day.

What I had been waiting for, without really knowing it, was cloud. Newport needs something overhead for the sun to light from underneath, and that morning it got about twenty minutes of it. I worked the rock shelf first, then the pylon, then climbed up for the whole sweep, and I have been back through the frames several times since to check I did not imagine the colour.

If you swim here, or park here, or walk the dog along this sand at six in the morning, you will already know which one of these is yours.