North Berwick is a pleasant 35 minute train ride from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. I go there regularly for the coffee shops, the busy high street, and of course the sea views. What I don’t go there for usually is photography, because the setting is all too familiar to me,

Normally this isn’t a problem. Yes, form time to time I see things that make me think “that would make a great photograph” but that isn’t why I’m there. Relaxation, and a break away from the city, is my reason for being there. Occasionally though, a scene presents itself that just demands to be photographed.

That’s what happened when I was there earlier this month at high tide, on a day when the storm swell sent waves crashing over the Old Pier.

What do you do in this situation when you only have a mobile phone? I braced my phone against a guardrail and shot a series of frames, timing them for maximum drama. Of course my very ordinary phone took a set of very ordinary photos but I knew there was something there.

Arriving home, I selected the four most promising frames and imported them into Affinity Studio as an image stack. That’s where the movement of the waves comes from. By importing them into Affinity Studio as an image stack, the default “median” setting blurs and softens the movement of the water, creating a long-exposure effect that normally would require a serious camera with a tripod.

Nice, but next time I hope I remember my camera. It’s a lot easier than doing it all in post.