Snails in Blue

On painting the shale blue

In mid-January 2025 I met up with Dave Mead and Joe Cornish for a session of east coast photography at Dave’s favourite beach. It is a place I have visited several times now and have always enjoyed, though it is important to synchronise the visit with the tides as it is a potentially very dangerous location.

Joe was looking to get a few hours under his belt out with his technical camera. I was on leave of absence from work until March and with other trips planned I wanted to keep my eye in.

It turned out to be a mostly clear blue sky day. Fortunately the cliff face is so high here that in the afternoons in winter the beach is in shade. This brings the colour of reflected light into play, as I knew it would, with the Mulgrave shale, as it is called, being lit blue by the blue sky above. I left my camera on Daylight white balance – as always – rather than let the auto colour balance make the decisions for me.

This area is not all that far from the place I had spent so much time – Mulgrave – completing my work from 2011-2014 so I always feel at home working the beach. Like Mulgrave there are some amazing concretions but that wasn’t my favoured subject this day.

I noticed some really fun snails on the beach with associated snail trails. I had shot some trails for the Mulgrave project in red but these blue colours really appealed and I made these two images in quick succession. The first was made when the shale was still wet – the main image. I loved the lines being lit with strong highlights. As the shale dried I found the second composition – the alternative image – with the snail trails themselves. I quite like the speckled look but it did remind me that shale dries out quickly – photographing the concretions at Mulgrave taught me that.

I still love this blue palette of shale in the shade lit by blue sky – many years after the first accidental sheet of transparency film at Robin Hood’s Bay in 2007 showed me that such alchemy was possible.