Most photographers who make it to the Essex coast stop at Southend. Harwich and Dovercourt sit at the far north-east corner, at the end of a quiet branch line, and get almost no photographic attention at all. That is the opportunity: the frames you make here will not look like anyone else's.

The two towns give you two very different subjects a few minutes apart. Harwich is a genuine working port at the mouth of the Stour and Orwell estuaries, with centuries of maritime history packed into a compact old town. Dovercourt is the Victorian seaside resort built alongside it, now weathered and quiet, which is exactly what makes it photograph well. You can shoot a working harbour and a melancholy English seafront in the same afternoon.

The old town is a tight grid of narrow streets that has kept its shape for centuries, and it rewards slow walking. This is the home town of Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, and the maritime past is everywhere in the naval buildings, the ships' chandlers and the estuary at the end of every street.

The Ha'penny Pier, dating from 1853, is the last of Harwich's timber piers and the natural anchor for a shoot: fishermen, the ferry across to Felixstowe and Shotley, and working boats against the huge estuary sky.

The High and Low Lighthouses, a pair of Georgian towers, stand a short walk apart in the town itself rather than on the shore, which makes for unusual frames of a lighthouse rising behind ordinary streets.

The Electric Palace, opened in 1911, is one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas in Britain still standing, and its frontage is a picture in itself.

The Redoubt, a circular Napoleonic fort of 1808, and the working ferry terminal at Harwich International across the water give you the industrial counterweight to the old town's charm. Container ships and cranes sit on the skyline behind the historic streets.

A few minutes down the line, Dovercourt is the seaside half of the day. The wide sandy beach and the long promenade are the classic British seaside subject, and the faded-resort atmosphere, quieter and more worn than Southend, is the mood to shoot for.

The stars are the Dovercourt leading lights: two cast-iron screw-pile lighthouses built in 1863, standing right out on the beach and connected to the shore. At low tide they are stranded on the open sands, and they are among the most striking and least-photographed structures on the whole East coast. Shoot them at low tide with a figure walking the flats for scale, or at dusk as silhouettes against the estuary sky.

Dovercourt also carries a slice of British popular history: the old Warner's holiday camp here was the setting that inspired the sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, and the seaside-holiday spirit it captured still hangs over the front out of season.

This is seaside and working-town photography, so the tradition applies: work the gap between the postcard and the reality, and shoot in colour, because the seaside's saturated signage and painted iron are part of the language. As on the rest of the coast, the worse the weather, often the better the picture.

Time your visit around the tide if the Dovercourt lights are your target: low tide opens the sands around them and completely changes the shot. In Harwich, come early or late for low estuary light down the narrow streets, and work the Ha'penny Pier when the ferry is loading. It is a small, quiet, working community rather than a tourist crush, so be courteous and unhurried, and the town opens up to you.