Spurn Point is one of the most dynamic coastal locations in the UK, and right now it looks completely different from how it did just a few months ago. If you shoot long exposures on the Yorkshire coast, that change matters more than you might expect.
Coming to you from Chris Baitson, this candid and atmospheric video follows Baitson through an early morning shoot at Spurn Point, where significant changes to the beach have physically reshaped what's possible compositionally. The rubble piled against the berm, the vanished sand, the newly exposed wooden posts — all of it has opened up angles that simply didn't exist before. Baitson is shooting with a 10-stop ND filter and a polarizer, pulling 60-second exposures at f/5.6 and ISO 200, working around a rising tide that's swallowing the beach faster than expected. What makes this video worth watching isn't just the location; it's that Baitson is openly rethinking how he edits, ditching his go-to preset in favor of working the sliders manually and seeing where that leads.
That editing shift came out of a previous shoot at Withernsea, where Baitson skipped his usual "Human Preset" workflow and preferred what he got. The OM System OM-5 he's shooting with handles the low-light conditions well, and the live ND feature factors into a specific decision he makes mid-shoot, one that forces a tradeoff between controlling the sky and getting the long exposure he actually wants. He chooses the 60-second exposure and plans to crop. Baitson walks through his reasoning out loud rather than cleaning it up in post.
The compositions Baitson works through range from tight shots of weathered wooden posts in the surf to a wider frame that pulls in a North Sea wind farm in the background. Some work better than others, and he's honest about that. The light is uncooperative in places, as the sun rises directly into one of the most promising compositions, blowing out the clouds with nothing he can do about it given the filter combination he's running. The newly cleared stretch of beach, which Baitson suspects was moved by heavy machinery to fight coastal erosion, gives him a straight run to posts he'd walked past hundreds of times without ever being able to reach. That's the kind of location shift that rewards showing up repeatedly, because a place you thought you knew can hand you something new without warning. Check out the video above for the full edit breakdown and the rest of the morning shoot from Baitson.
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