Ask most photographers what tide they want for a seascape and the answer is “low”. It is a reasonable default and it is wrong about half the time.

Low water exposes things — rock shelves, sand ripples, pools, the weed-covered stumps of an old pier. If the foreground is the picture, low water is usually what you want. But a lot of coastal photographs are not about the foreground at all, and for those, low water just means a long walk out to a subject that now looks stranded.

What each state is good for

Low water gives you foreground: texture, leading lines, reflective pools, and access to places you cannot otherwise stand. It also gives you the most beach, which is not always a gift — a wide expanse of flat wet sand is featureless unless the light is doing something.

High water brings the sea to the subject. A lighthouse, a pier, a rock stack, a sea wall — anything that is meant to look like it is in the water needs water around it. High water also kills a messy foreground, which is sometimes exactly what a cluttered beach needs.

The hour either side of low is where most of the good work happens, and it is the state people most often miss. You get the exposed foreground, but the water is close enough to move through it — pools still filling and draining, rivulets running back out, weed lifting and settling. Slack low water is static. A tide on the move is not.

Springs and neaps matter more than the tide table suggests. A spring low uncovers ground a neap low never reaches, so a location that is spectacular twice a month can be ordinary the rest of the time. If a spot only works on a big low, it is worth writing that down.

The thing that actually catches people out

Tide height and tide time are separate problems, and it is the second one that ruins shoots.

You can know perfectly well that a location wants low water, and still arrive to find low water happening at 1pm, in flat overhead light, in July. The state of tide you need has to coincide with the light you need, and on any given stretch of coast that coincidence happens in clusters — a run of days where low water lands near sunset, then a fortnight where it does not.

Working that out from a tide table means reading two columns and doing the mental arithmetic for every day of the month. It is not difficult. It is just dull enough that most of us do it for the next three days and no further.

Doing it without a signal

Tides in Apex Lucis are worked out on the device, from harmonic constants for thousands of stations worldwide. Nothing is fetched, which means the predictions work on a headland with no bars, in a car park in Sutherland, or on a plane — which is where you tend to want them.

You get the extremes and the heights for any date, a chart you can scrub through, and a classification of each window from Very Low to Very High so you can see at a glance whether a day is a spring or a neap without comparing numbers.

More usefully, the tide sits alongside the light rather than in a separate app. A booking at a coastal location shows the tide rows for that date next to first light, golden hour and sunset — so the question is not “when is low water” but “does low water land anywhere near the light”, which is the question you actually had.

There is also a safe-height setting per location, for the places where the tide is not a compositional matter but a cut-off. If you shoot causeways or beaches with a single exit, it is worth filling in.

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The Tides guide → covers choosing a station, reading the chart, and setting a cut-off height for a location. Station coverage is densest around the United States and western Europe, so it is worth checking your own coast before relying on it.

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