Mel and I decided that the seasons were finally on the change, and to prove it to ourselves, we went for a late evening walk down to Sandbanks. I grabbed the camera, figuring that the low tide could reveal some lovely, expansive shots out across the bay.

The frame you see here was one of a series caught that evening. On the turn of the tide, the moment would have been lost entirely, but this lady and her dog walked out into the bay for well over an hour. We actually bumped into her again on our way back home.

I showed this shot to some other photographers recently, and they insisted I should have cropped it into a tighter landscape format to lose the detail in the foreground. I chose to completely ignore them. I think that foreground gives the image the scale and breathing room it needs to tell the story of the low tide. Let me know what you think…

Shooting with the Canon 20D and the 17-40mm lens at its widest 17mm setting allowed me to capture that vast, wet sand foreground they wanted me to cut. Working in the fading light, dropping to f/4.5 and a shutter speed of 1/60th was just enough to handhold the shot and pull in the evening atmosphere at ISO 100.

• shooting mode|aperture priority
• exposure bias|0 ev
• metering mode|evaluative
• image quality|RAW
• raw converter|Photoshop CS
• cropped|no

• taken|6 march, 2005
• camera|Canon EOS 20D
• focal length|40mm
• aperture|f/4.5
• shutter speed|1/60s
• iso|100
• flash fired|no
• exposure bias|0 ev
• location|Poole, United Kingdom