Sunday morning seemed like the perfect time to go to the beach. There was a lot of wind, so I hoped for some interesting waves. However, it was low-tide, so the waves were there, but far away. And because of the wind (did I say there was a lot!), I didn’t want to change lenses at the beach, so I had to shoot everything from a 35mm perspective.

I was there pretty early, the first half hour or so I had the beach all to myself. The clouds looked wonderful, and there was enough sun to lighten up parts of the clouds. I have been trying to create more pastel-colored photo’s, and this was a good opportunity to do exactly that.

The photo’s don’t show it all that well, but the wind was pretty intense. I felt the sand exfoliating my face, especially when walking close to the dunes. But it did make me feel like a proper hard-core photographer with the cold and the wind and no-one being there but me. In the photo below you can see a little bit of the wind in the dunes. I think next time I’ll go to a beach with a high quay or something to get more spectacular wave-beating and splashing.

The location of Hoek van Holland provides more than just beach. It is at the entrance of the Nieuwe Waterweg, so looking south you can see the cranes on the Maasvlakte, which is part of the Rotterdam harbour. The cranes together with the deep green of the Nieuwe Waterweg provides a total different atmosphere, as you can see in the photo below.

Next to the Nieuwe Waterweg is a breakwater, which is shown in the photo on top of this post, and the rocks looked pretty photogenic to me. Due to the wind there was some foam, and the dark colors of the rocks gave some nice contrasts. This photo is my favourite from this series, although I spent hours trying different cut-outs before deciding on this one.

I’ll finish with two more pastel coloured photos. You can see that eventually some people showed up…