Hopton-on-Sea

Tucked away in the far south-eastern corner of Norfolk, sits Hopton-on-Sea and it’s gem of a beach. Although I have visited the village of Hopton on numerous occasions, I had (embarrassingly) never been to the beach. It took my return to landscape photography two years ago before I set foot on this wonderful little gem of the Norfolk coast. I blogged about it in the post Hopton Rocks, along with why I love this place as a photographic location.


There was very little movement in the sea so close to the reef, but the sunset colours do help give some interest to this image.

Since then I have been back quite a few times, always looking to explore the beach and find interesting compositions, whilst hoping for the best of weather conditions whilst I’m there. What I have found with Hopton, is that the tide height is important.

When shooting at large, wide, open beaches like Gorleston, I find the tide height of little consequence, as there are areas of the beach that will give good compositions whatever the sea is doing. Hopton, however, is different. It’s a small, narrow beach, where the tide height makes a huge difference.


A rare portrait format image. I tend to shoot exclusively in landscape format these days.

High tide leaves very little or no beach to stand on, which for a photographer like myself who likes to be close-up to the sea makes things tricky, but does give plenty of drama as waves break against the granite flood defences. Low tide can be uninspiring if you don’t have a decent backdrop of a colourful sky, as the movement of the sea is limited, (the man-made reefs doing their job) and the shingle and stones are on show, not the nice clean sand that I prefer! So I’m always looking for somewhere in between (I know…never happy am I?) where I can get movement in the water, preferably between and around the rocks with clean sand…AND a nice sky…


Over to the centre of the bay the wave movement was more pronounced...and more interesting!

However, my latest visit was at low tide, but I did hope to have some sunset colours to bail me out. I did wonder if I would get any shots at all from this visit. I was struggling finding a composition that I liked around the rocks, the water wasn’t moving particularly much near them either…..and sunset was fast approaching.
Instead I opted to come back into the middle of one of the bays where the waves were actually breaking onto the beach with some sort of vigour. The bay I was working in has an old Groyne structure out to sea, which I used as the focal point of the images, moving around to change the view to include edges of the reefs for something slightly different.


I isolated the groyne structure for this shot, composing to remove the edges of the rock reefs from the image.

It wasn’t a hugely productive shoot, I’m in two minds about adding any of the images into my gallery….time will tell, however, it was another chance to learn some more about this little gem of a location. If anything, it has made me want to return again very soon…..I’m hoping to do a sunrise shoot here before too long. Although I will need the tide, the sky to align at a time I can make. Fingers crossed for that!


The light had all but disappeared in this image. One of the very last of the shoot.

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