Viking Bay Infrared
24 July 2022 · 13:42 · Viking Bay, Broadstairs, Kent
The name is more recent than it sounds. The beach at Broadstairs was called Main Sands until 1949, when a replica Viking longship rowed across the North Sea from Denmark and landed on its shore in commemoration of the 1,500th anniversary of the arrival of Hengist and Horsa on the nearby coast of Thanet. Crowds came to watch the landing; the boat was hauled up the shingle; and the beach was renamed Viking Bay in the aftermath. The longship itself was moved to Pegwell Bay, closer to the original landing site, where it still stands. The name has been in place for barely three-quarters of a century, which by the standards of Kent place-names makes it practically new.
The panorama was assembled from ten handheld frames, shot with manual exposure throughout to keep the tonal values consistent across the full width of the image. Ten frames at 14mm, overlapping sufficiently for Photoshop's merge algorithm to find shared geometry between adjacent panels and assemble them into a single image without visible seams. The resulting file covers an arc of somewhere around 180 degrees, from the cliffs on the upper left to the open sea on the right, with the beach and bay occupying the lower half. The Thanet offshore wind farm is just visible on the horizon at the far right — Thanet Wind Farm, opened in 2010 with 100 turbines, was at the time of its completion the largest offshore wind farm in the world by capacity.
The colour infrared rendering does different things to different parts of this scene. The sky, as always with the 720nm conversion, records as deep blue — darker than any blue sky appears in visible light, the atmosphere's scattering of shorter wavelengths suppressed. The sand on the beach, wet near the waterline and dry further up, responds differently to infrared in each condition: wet sand reflects less, dry sand more, giving the beach a tonal variation across its width. The chalk reef on the right-hand side of the bay — exposed at low tide — renders white and slightly luminous, the calcium carbonate absorbing and re-emitting infrared more intensely than the surrounding seawater. The people on the beach and in the water read as pale, almost ghostly, reduced to marks on the surface of the scene.
On the upper left of the frame, at the top of the cliff above the beach, stands Bleak House — originally Fort House, built around 1801 and leased by Charles Dickens from the 1840s until 1852. It was in that house, which he described as his "airy nest" above the harbour, that he wrote David Copperfield. He visited Broadstairs regularly between 1837 and 1859 and wrote an affectionate sketch of the town, Our English Watering-Place, in which he described it with the particular warmth of somewhere genuinely valued rather than merely visited. The Royal Albion Hotel on the seafront below — originally the Phoenix Inn, built in 1760 and renamed in 1805 in honour of the Battle of Trafalgar — was where Dickens stayed before taking the house on the cliff. The building with the red facade is visible in the upper left of the panorama, its Victorian bulk above the beach huts and promenade. The Dickens Festival takes place in Broadstairs each June, filling the town with Victorian dress and maintaining an association that is now nearly two centuries old.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm infrared conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/11 · 1/125s · ISO 200 · 10-frame panorama stitched in Photoshop
