Early Morning Swimmers
12 March 2022 · 08:35 · Dover Beach, Kent
Dover beach in early March belongs to a particular kind of person. The water temperature in the Channel at this time of year sits at around 9°C — cold enough that most people's instinct is to observe from a distance, preferably with a warm drink. The three figures making their way out of the sea and up the shingle that Saturday morning had apparently formed a different view. Rendered white against the near-black infrared sea, trailing wet shadows on the pebbles, they read as marks on a page more than as people — the Lowry comparison was unavoidable the moment I raised the camera.
The shot was taken from the marina pier looking east along the seafront, the town spread out across the middle ground with Marine Parade and its long Georgian terrace to the left, and Dover Castle on its chalk headland rising to the right. The castle has occupied that site in some form since the Iron Age, the current structure dating from the 1180s when Henry II spent £6,000 — a colossal sum for the period — on its rebuilding. The tunnels beneath it, dug originally for Napoleonic cannon emplacements, served as Churchill's Channel command headquarters during the Battle of Britain. On a cloudy March morning the castle sits above the town with the settled authority of something that has seen more than its share of the weather.
Dover beach is not a swimming beach in the conventional sense. It is a working beach — shingle, occasionally hostile, overlooked by a major port — and the people who swim from it regularly are, for the most part, serious about it. Shakespeare Beach, a short distance to the west, is the traditional departure point for Channel crossings, and Dover's wild swimming community includes a significant proportion of aspiring and practised Channel swimmers who use the open water year-round for training. Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the Channel unassisted, left from Admiralty Pier on 24 August 1875 and arrived at Calais 21 hours and 45 minutes later, having covered considerably more than the 33-kilometre straight-line distance due to the currents of the Strait. The Dover Strait is still, by international agreement, the only route in the world where sea swimmers have the same navigational right of way as shipping.
The sky on this particular morning was what made the trip worthwhile. A strong SSW wind was pushing a succession of cloud formations across the seafront, and in infrared — where blue sky records as black and white cloud records bright — the effect is of a sky several stops more dramatic than the eye saw it. The technical details are straightforward: 1/150s at f/10 was fast enough to keep the figures sharp despite the breeze, and the 14mm lens on the X-E1's APS-C sensor gives an equivalent field of view of 21mm — wide enough to take in the full sweep from the pier back along the beach to the castle, without distorting the foreground.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm infrared conversion) · Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R · 14mm (21mm equiv.) · f/10 · 1/150s · ISO 400
The X-E1 was Fujifilm's second X-series interchangeable-lens camera, released in late 2012. When its successor bodies arrived, this one was sent for a 720nm infrared conversion — a process that replaces the camera's low-pass filter with a bandpass filter that transmits only wavelengths above 720 nanometres, rendering foliage white, skies dark, and water almost black. At 720nm the conversion retains some colour information in the raw file, which can be processed as black and white or into the false-colour palettes characteristic of infrared work. It is, in the fullest sense, a different camera from the one it was before.
