Last Call, Warm Summer’s Night, Bexhill-on-Sea

As anyone who follows my travels at home would know, I am a creature of the early morning hours – nearly always on the road by 4:30am and often much earlier during the summer months. Early morning hours suit me. They always have. I love the colour of the light at dawn, and I like the blissful solitude of the small hours of the morning when all the rest of polite society is in bed. But yesterday evening was so lovely and clear and warm I decided to drag the bicycle out of the shed and go for a spin along the seafront and out on the marsh. It was a very different experience – there was much more traffic on the road, even as the day was winding down, and the sun was in a different part of the sky, casting different shadows and plays of light than the ones I am accustomed to. I decided to treat it as an exploratory ride and not bother much about shooting, but on the way back home, after sunset, as I was riding along the nearly deserted promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea, a came upon this old-fashioned ice cream kiosk closing down for the night after a long and busy day pedalling ice creams to holiday beach-goers. Something about the scene put me in mind of Edward Hopper’s painting Gas, where a solitary figure of a man is closing down a gas station on a lonely road with dusk creeping up around him. I stopped and set up my tripod to capture this image.