The Image Before the Image.

Notes on Anticipation — From thought to image

This photograph was taken in between jobs, right after dropping my daughters off at school.

I went to a familiar place. So familiar that I know how light, wind, and waves behave there—how they approach, how they bend, where they hesitate.

On a transversal jetty at the beach in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a statue stands facing north. perpendicular to beach and water. It portrays Pasifae, hidden inside a cow. Beyond the myth, the structure itself is the reason the beach grew southward, altering currents, sediment, and the way waves arrive.

When the wind helps and the sea builds, some waves break against the rocks and throw spray high enough to briefly cover her. It doesn’t happen often. The shape of the jetty usually keeps the water low, contained, restrained.

But when the last storm began to move in, I knew the conditions might align. The direction was right. The size felt right. I expected that one of the larger sets would finally rise high enough behind the statue.

That morning, after leaving the girls at school, I grabbed the camera, the tripod, and an ND filter and went down to the beach—not to see if something would happen, but to meet something I had already imagined.

I’ve photographed wave spray many times before, usually with high shutter speeds—freezing the water mid-air, fragmenting it into sharp droplets. But that wasn’t the image I had in mind.

This time I needed to slow things down.

I wanted to photograph not the rise of the water, but the moment just after—when gravity reclaims it. When sharp edges soften, when the falling spray turns into light trails, when motion becomes gesture rather than impact.

I waited about forty minutes. Testing. Adjusting. Looking for the shutter speed that would describe the water the way I felt it, not the way it looks at first glance. While waiting, I played with other possibilities that the slow exposure opened up, drifting briefly into my own take on ICM.

Then I saw the set coming.

The angle was right. The direction was right. I knew one of those waves would be the one.

I prepared.
I shot five frames.
Two before.
One exactly where it needed to be.
Two after.

And I knew.

The confirmation came later, back in the car, when I quickly scrolled through the sequence in the viewfinder. After that, my mind shifted—back to work, to the day ahead, to the anticipation of returning to the studio and downloading the files, to see whether what I had felt and what I had imagined had truly crossed into the image.

It had.

I’m satisfied with the result. I know it could be tweaked, refined, even improved. But that’s not the point.

This image is not a conclusion.
It’s the first spoken word of a thought.
The beginning of an idea finding its form.