Storm

There aren't many pictures in here, the storms and the rainbows that come with them, and that isn't modesty. Storm work is mostly failure, and I don't put much of it up. The weather that does the real damage in Sydney comes from east coast lows, which spin up off the coast in autumn and winter, and then simply park there. They don't behave like a front that crosses over in an afternoon and takes the rain with it. So one of those will sit offshore, pushing an enormous amount of water at the shore, for two or three days without a break.

The serious harm happens when that swell lands on top of a king tide. In April 2025 the two turned up together, and tore into Bondi, Bronte, and the beaches all the way down to Cronulla. And the east coast low of June 2016 ate metres of beach at Collaroy, up on the northern beaches, and left backyards and swimming pools hanging in mid air. You'd find it hard to credit that a beach which took ten years to build can be gone in a night, right up until you see the before and after.

I don't shoot any of it from the water, for the straightforward reason that it would kill me. So it's made from high ground, with a long lens, and the enemy isn't the wave at all, it's the salt. In a big southerly the spray comes over the headland as a fog, and it's on your front element inside thirty seconds, so you work in bursts of a few frames, wipe the glass, wait, and go again.

What I'm really chasing is the moment a wave meets something fixed, whether that's a pool wall, a headland, or a set of steps somebody poured in the 1930s and assumed would outlast them. On an ordinary day those structures read as permanent and the sea reads as decoration (and you can see why people build where they build). In an east coast low, it's the reverse.