Tura Beach Waves

Spray lifts high above a cresting wave as it meets the sandstone cliff line near Tura Beach on the south coast of New South Wales, the water cycling from deep blue to white foam mid-break. A faint band of mist hangs across the upper mid-ground where successive swells have already broken. The cliff face to the left shows its layered rock in the gaps between surges.

Brett photographed this on the afternoon of 19 December 2016, on the Nikon D810 with an 80-400mm lens at a five-thousandth of a second. The long lens compresses the swell against the rock so that wave and cliff occupy the same plane, and the fast shutter holds the spray exactly where it was, which is the opposite of the approach he takes to most of his seascapes. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on, and no history attaches to this piece of coast. The frame is force and texture and nothing else: water against stone, caught at the instant one gives way to the other.