Our Lady of Hastings
An Early October Morning in 2010 · The Stade, Hastings, East Sussex
The drive from Canterbury had started in the small hours, the intention being to arrive on The Stade before first light. The shingle beach that forms Hastings's working fishing ground carries one of the oldest names in use on the English coastline: stade is an Anglo-Saxon word for landing place, in use here before the Battle of 1066 and continuous since. The fleet that has launched from this beach for over a thousand years is, by most measures, the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Europe — over twenty-five boats at the time of writing, working from shingle rather than a harbour because Hastings has never had a harbour capable of accommodating them. Various attempts to build one were made between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; all failed or were destroyed by storms. The beach-launch is not a picturesque tradition maintained for tourists but the practical consequence of geography.
The boat in the image is Our Lady, registration CF6. The CF prefix indicates the port of Cardigan, on the west coast of Wales, which raises the question of how a vessel registered in Wales came to be beached at Hastings. Fishing boat registrations follow the vessel through its working life as it changes hands and ports; a CF registration on The Stade means only that the boat was registered in Cardigan at some point, not necessarily that it has ever worked those waters recently. Our Lady was, at the time this was taken, a working vessel — visibly used, its hull weathered and patched, equipment on deck, nets and gear around the base — rather than a decommissioned hulk left to decay. The pale blue of the gunwale and the script lettering of the name plate give it a kind of maintained dignity within the general wear of a working life.
The image was shot on Fujifilm Velvia 50, a colour reversal (slide) film that carries ISO 50 — slow by most standards, requiring either bright conditions or a tripod, but delivering colour saturation and grain structure that have made it the standard choice for landscape and nature photography since its introduction in 1990. Velvia's handling of warm tones is particularly distinctive: the amber and ochre of weathered timber, the rust-brown of aged ironwork, the grey of shingle — all rendered with a richness and tonal depth that faster films at equivalent settings do not achieve. The sky in this image, overcast with a thin high cloud that diffuses rather than blocks the light, is where the colour rendering is most visible: the warm buff of the cloud base, the cool grey of the upper sky, the shift between them, all handled with more gradation than a digital file would typically produce from the same scene at the same exposure without post-processing.
The Stade is also one of the few places in England where the traditional net shops — the tall, narrow black-tarred wooden sheds used to store fishing nets — still stand in significant numbers. They are unique to Hastings, their height dictated by the need to hang nets vertically for drying, their width constrained by the narrowness of the beach. Several survive from the nineteenth century, and the cluster of them behind the fishing quarter is a listed heritage site. They are not visible in the frame, but would have been only a few metres behind the camera position when this was taken.
Mamiya 7ii · 65mm f/4 L · exposure unrecorded · Fujifilm Velvia 50
The 65mm lens is the wide-angle option for the Mamiya 7ii system, equivalent to approximately 32mm on a full-frame 35mm camera. It is a fixed-aperture f/4 lens, one stop slower than the 80mm, and produces slightly more pronounced perspective distortion at close range while maintaining the system's characteristic sharpness across the frame.
