Midday beach light can look brutal through an ultra-wide. If most of your landscape time is squeezed into sunrise and sunset, this approach pushes you to build usable skills when the sun is doing you no favors.
Coming to you from Ian Worth, this clear-eyed video starts with a viewer question that probably matches your own frustration: why bother shooting when the light feels harsh and bright? Worth doesn’t dodge it with theory. He goes out at midday, walks the beach, and treats the changing sky like the main subject instead of waiting for a “safe” hour to arrive. You see him hunt for rock formations and patterns in the sand that can hold up under contrast, then wait for cloud breaks to shape the scene. The useful part is how he treats waiting as an active choice, not dead time, because the sky keeps handing you different versions of the same frame.
Worth also shows how small setup decisions shift the whole picture when the foreground is busy. You’ll watch him work with a tripod set higher than you might expect for an ultra-wide look, specifically to control spacing and keep edges from tangling. He talks through trying to separate heavy textures so the image doesn’t turn into a single noisy slab of detail. There’s also a candid moment where he admits he isn’t sure a composition is working, and he still counts it as time well spent. If you tend to judge a day by one “keeper,” this part lands differently, because it’s about building instincts you can actually use when the weather turns strange.
The video gets more interesting once the day starts to swing toward late light and the forecast stops behaving. Worth is out long enough to catch a sudden shift in cloud density and mood, and he adapts instead of forcing the earlier plan. He leans into the black-and-white preview to read shape and separation while the sun is still punching hard from one side, then waits for diffusion to soften the shadows. You’ll see him chase a specific relationship between a rock, a pool, and the edge of cloud, but he doesn’t hand you a neat recipe or pretend the scene will cooperate on demand. The tension is real: you can do everything “right” and still need the sky to move a few degrees. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Worth.