Sea stacks at Playa de Requesinos

A couple of years ago I spent 10 days exploring and photographing along the north coast of Spain. I hadn’t expected it to feel so familiar, but again and again I was reminded of the west coast of Ireland; the same broad Atlantic light, the same weather systems rolling in low and heavy, the same sense of exposure and scale.

As usual, I’ve been slow to release the work. Until recently only one image from the trip had made it out into the world. The rest waited.

Playa de Requesinos was one of the locations that stayed with me. The beach is scattered with sea stacks and fractured rock formations, each with a distinct silhouette. I returned several times during the trip, drawn by how the tide transformed the foreground and how differently each stack held itself against the horizon.

The long exposures stripped the movement from the water and softened the Atlantic into something almost weightless. Combined with the heavy cloud cover that day, the scene became less about location and more about form. Mass set against space. Texture set against stillness.

When processing the images in Capture One, colour quickly felt unnecessary. The relationships that mattered were tonal rather than chromatic, the separation between rock, sea and sky; the layered greys within the cloud; the way light traced the fractured edges of stone. Black and white clarified those relationships and allowed the shapes to take precedence.

Looking back at the files, it became clear that three of the frames spoke to one another. Each stack stands alone, but together they form variations on a single theme, one of endurance, balance and time written into rock.

You can find more images from Spain in my Europe & Beyond portfolio or in my Seascapes & Shorelines portfolio.