I really needed someone to pose for this since I needed a longer exposure to blur the waves but any movement would blur the person in it as well.

I didn't have someone to hand but thankfully this guy's dog needed to give the grass a good schniff and therefore held him in place for as long as I needed. Unfortunately the dog was just over the hill, since I would have liked to have had him/her in the shot as well.

I had zoomed out on a couple of the earlier shots to essentially lose him in the image but the more I looked at the scene the more that I realised that I had to go entirely the other way; to zoom in to make the image a clear split between the uncontrolled nature of the breaking waves, and the neat, manicured artificiality of the car park and the grass with my guy forming the connection between them.

There was a bit of luck and a bit of planning in this. The luck is that (aside from the fact that he was there at all) he was wearing reddish clothing which really goes well against ocean scenes. Obviously there was no way to predict that a stranger would be there to do that; sometimes these things just fall into your lap. Another is that his dog held him there like that.

The planning part was that once I knew I had my subject I needed to estimate the timing of the wave breaking to get the maximum amount of white water behind him for him to stand out against. Thankfully it was a pretty turbulent morning and I'd had quite a few breaking waves to give me an idea of how fast and where they were coming in.

The result... you see here. Part luck, part design, as much photography is.