Belle de plage. Lingerie where the ocean usually goes, Val, sand, and the soft scandal of dressing up with nowhere formal to be. Salt air and a slow, knowing look.

The sky did most of the heavy lifting on this one. Deep flat blue all the way across, no clouds to break it up, and a daytime moon sitting up there so pale I almost missed it in the viewfinder. Val laid out low on the wet sand in a trench coat and white lace, propped on one elbow, hair fallen across her face, the surf doing its thing way off behind her shoulder.

I shot it from down at her level, basically lying in the sand myself, so the horizon runs dead straight behind her and she fills the whole bottom of the frame. The coat half on, half off. Eyes down. Nothing performed about it. She looked like someone who’d wandered out of somewhere fancier and decided the beach was better.

The light was that clean low-afternoon kind that makes everybody look carved out of warm stone. I didn’t fight it. You get a sky and a stretch of sand like that to yourself, you just keep quiet and shoot until the tide tells you to move.