I found the salinas by accident, driving back from somewhere else, and spent the next year and a half going back roughly once a month. The appeal was simple and took me a while to articulate: it is a landscape with no accidents in it. Every line was dug by somebody. Every edge is where somebody decided an edge should be.

And then it is handed entirely over to evaporation, which does not care about the geometry at all.

A made landscape, abandoned to weather.

On shooting it on film

I tried this series digitally for the first two months and it did not work. The colour at the salinas sits in a very narrow band, pinks and greys and a specific chalky white, and digital kept resolving it into something cleaner and more separated than it looks standing there. Portra held the whole thing together in a way I could not replicate in editing.

There is also a pace argument. Ten frames a roll, on a camera with no meter I trust completely, means I look for much longer before committing. On a landscape this static, that is the entire discipline.

What I got wrong

I spent the first winter photographing the pans from the walkways, which is where everybody photographs them, and the frames are competent and look like everybody else's. The series only became itself when I started asking the co-operative for access to the working channels, which took three polite emails and a visit, and got me into the parts that are not designed to be looked at.

The lesson, if there is one: the view from the path is the view everybody has already made.

This series exists because I could not sleep for most of the spring of 2025, and because the harbour at Peniche is a twenty minute drive from a house I was renting. I started going down at one in the morning with no plan at all.

What I found was the only version of these places that is not arranged for anybody. During the day a working harbour performs a little for the people looking at it. At two in the morning it is just a job, done by tired people, under terrible light.

Working fast in the dark

Everything here is handheld, available light, wide open, at ISOs I would have refused to use five years ago. There is no tripod in this series and no flash in it either, both on purpose. A tripod makes you a person who has set up, and a flash makes you a person who has arrived. Neither is useful when you are trying to be furniture.

• One body, two primes, no bag
• Shutter never below 1/15, because the boats move even when moored
• Noise accepted rather than fought, then left in at the print stage
• Nothing shot that I had not been standing near for ten minutes first

On asking

I asked permission more in this series than in anything else I have made. Harbours are working places with real hazards and real people in them, and showing up at two in the morning with a camera is a thing that deserves an explanation. Most of the explanations were accepted. Two were not, and I left.

The best frame is never worth being the person who took it badly.

Three winters, one filter, and a great deal of salt water in places it should not have been. This is the earliest of the three series and the one I am least able to explain.

The idea, such as it was: stand exactly where the water stops, and leave the shutter open long enough that the water stops looking like water. What comes back is not a photograph of the sea. It is a photograph of roughly thirty seconds, which turns out to look like fog, or smoke, or nothing at all.

Equipment, and losing it

I destroyed one tripod, flooded a camera body, and lost a filter holder to a wave I had watched coming and misjudged. All of that is in the budget now. If you work at the tide line, the tide line eventually charges you.

The practical version, for anybody who wants to try it: go at low tide on a falling tide, not a rising one. Watch the water for fifteen minutes before you set anything down. Assume every seventh wave is larger than the six before it, because often enough it is.

Why it stopped

I made the last frame in this series in February 2023 and have not added to it since. The honest reason is that I had said the thing I had to say and was starting to repeat myself with slightly better technique, which is the worst way a series can end.

Better frames of the same idea are not a longer series.

So it sits at nineteen frames, which feels right, and I went off to photograph salt instead.