What drew me in here wasn’t the beach itself, but the mix of stillness and movement. There’s something oddly delicate about people scattered like this—some lying down, others wandering by the waterline, and a few mid-conversation. It’s early spring, not quite warm, not quite cold. That kind of limbo between seasons.
I framed this from above to flatten the space a bit and to give the sea a sense of distance. The composition pulls your eye diagonally from the lower left corner to the top right, but then you start noticing the smaller stories happening in between. The long shadows on the sand helped to break up the light and added some much-needed contrast.
I chose black and white because the colors weren’t adding anything. Stripping them out put the focus on texture and form—the grain of the sand, the ripples in the sea, and the subtle silhouettes of people just being. It’s not dramatic, but that’s kind of the point. Just a quiet scene that felt real.
Welcome to my world of photography. I am Martijn Jebbink, born in the Netherlands and living in Rome.
I grew up in a small town, surrounded by an impressive forest. In that environment I developed my own way of looking at the world. At first, I didn’t see..
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