I’m really slow processing the photos from that night, because I’m still bitter about that evening.

The evening at Garrapata Beach at Big Sur was going fine. Beautiful light, no wind, big waves (it was the day before the Mavericks competition took place), no one but me and a few teenagers at the beach. What could go wrong, right?

Oh, as always, many things. I left my camera bag where I thought it was safe, where the sand looked dry, almost all the way at the end of the beach by the cliffs. As I was busy shooting away, I noticed that one big wave seemed to kept going longer than all the others. But it was too late. It went straight through my opened camera bag, soaking everything inside and actually killing my laptop that was still running for whatever reason (don’t you hate it when PC laptops doesn’t properly shut down?). The IT guys at my work found sand and salt on the inside disk of the hard drive. I think that wave killed both the hard drive and the laptop shell.

We must respect the ocean.

Nikon D300
24mm, f/16, 1/20 s, ISO100
Lee ND Grad 0.6 + 0.9

Some shots get you really into the scene, like this one.

Last Sunday was another cloudy post-stormy day here in Northern California, and I met up with Jim Patterson and Kendra back at Garrapata Beach. This time around it was a negative tide, so many layers of sand were gone, revealing all kinds of big rocks and boulders that are typically covered by the sand. In fact, the beach was almost impossible to recognize.

Towards the end of the day I ended up close to these sweet looking rocks that the waves keep beating up on. I love the trails that the waves created, and I wanted to capture the blue colors of that evening, as day turned into night. I dropped by shoes, rolled up my jeans up and stood there for 10-15 minutes watching and shooting these waves. How did end? See that big boy in the background? It got to me, as I was focusing my attention on the foreground, and I end up getting immersed to my chest in the water. Luckily, I grabbed the camera, but my ankle still have bruised from all the rolling rocks that the wave brought with it. Needless to say, I was done with that frame.

Nikon D300
20mm, f/14, 0.6 sec, ISO400
ND Grad 0.9

It’s that time of the year again on the Pacific Coast when the storms come out, when the crowds disappear and when each sunset is rich with variety of color. With that in mind, I drove down to Santa Cruz last night to shoot at a new location where I have not shot before.

Natural Bridges State Beach is a great location any time of the year (for an entirely different outtake of the same scene, for example, check out this shot from my buddy Jim Patterson – link). Looking at the weather forecast yesterday, I noticed that the low tide was coming in right around the sunset, so I thought it might be a good time to try the reflection shot of that arch. As I got to the beach, the dramatic clouds that I saw on the way to the beach cleared, as it often happens, but that still did not take away the color that was changing every moment during the golden/twilight hour.

I’ll be doing a lot more shooting at the coast and elsewhere outdoors in general in the coming months, because I want to continue to build that body of work and shift my focus that way from everything else I was shooting recently.

.. I’m beginning a new series with this image that I’d like to title “Where I Belong”.

I have few more of more abstract shots to post like the one I posted yesterday, but before I go that route, I wanted to post a more straight forward view of the redwood trees that I caught on the same day.

Some photos help us remember not the visual sense of the place, but also the feeling and sometimes even the smell of it. This is one of those.

Abandoned Davenport Pier, Davenport, California.

Big thanks goes to my buddy Jim Patterson, who faithfully geo-tags all his photos, for helping me find this location. BlackStar GPS app for my Blackberry also comes handy (I’ll review it in my next post), as now I can get exact coordinates for all my photos or pre-map the locations before I head of of the house.

Having no photos I was happy with to submit to Flickr 64 Challenge, a contest where you are paired up in against other photographers in March Madness style (I’m was actually in the final – I have no idea how that happened), I woke up early on Saturday and headed to the Pacific Coast. In the summers that typically means fog, but I decided to deal with it anyway and focus on minimalistic composition. The fog was coupled with smoke from the nearby Santa Cruz fires, but the beach was completely empty, which is always a photographer’s dream.

A hike to get to this place is actually very steep, and I kept telling myself not to look down. Time to upgrade my hiking shoes.

This is how we spend our winters here. Taken back in January.

The Edge of Cypress Grove Cliff, Point Lobos State Reserve

Just received this in my email:

This afternoon held some “good news, bad news” for California’s state park system.

The bad news first – the Legislature’s Budget Conference Committee voted to adopt the Governor’s proposal to eliminate core, state funding for our state parks.  But the good news – and it’s good!- is that the committee also voted to enact the State Park Access Pass, CSPF’s proposal from last year to institute a surcharge on vehicle license fees of non-commercial vehicles, in order to provide Californians with free day-use access to state parks and generate much-needed revenues for the system.  The version adopted by the Budget Conference Committee today differs from last year’s proposal in that today’s action adopted a $15 fee, in order to gain permanent General Fund savings of approximately $143 million annually.  In exchange for paying the fee, residents driving into state parks with a California license plate would receive free day-use entrance into state parks.

This is good news, but it’s only one step toward a final budget victory.  Since the vote was divided, this proposal still has a high hurdle to overcome, in order to be enacted. Please TAKE ACTION and send a message to your legislator supporting the State Park Access Pass and urging the Legislature to Save Our State Parks!

Thank you for your support for CSPF and the Save Our State Parks campaign!

Elizabeth Goldstein
President, CSPF

Personally, I think these are great news. The fees we pay to register our cars here in California are outragous (we paid over $300 the other day for an annual registration on our Toyota Camry the other day – can’t imagine what people pay for luxury cars), but I don’t mind an increase of $15 if that means I can enter state parks for free. In fact, I go to state parks at least twice a month, and pay $10 each time to enter/park, so $15/year is a change I welcome, if it irritates other Californians who never visit state parks. However, I’m sure this is not how the final ruling on this will look like, but I’m glad legistalators are listening to us, the California citizens, and are going to try to find a solution that will be people and nature friendly.

The first Panther Beach clean up that we organized was a success. There were a total of five of us who showed up and two more got lost on the way and ended up cleaning the beach nearby. It is amazing how much trash there was on such a little piece of the coast – I’ll never understand the people who simply leave their rubbish behind.

We’re planning on doing these on a somewhat regular basis, especially on those beaches that counties typically ignore. Stay tuned for more details in the future.

I was going to write more, but Jim Patterson (who’s idea started this all) had an excellent write up with highlights from the clean up that does it better than I ever could. He also posted a picture of yours truly in action taking a shot I posted on Sunday after the clean up. You can see Jim’s write up it here.

Panther Beach, Davenport, California

Today was the Panther Beach clean up and I’m happy to report, five of us turned up and had a great time. We gathered up at least 10 bags of trash, and following that, Mother Nature treated us nicely with some clouds that rolled in just as we pulled our cameras out (it was cloudless for hours before that). I’ll have a full post about it on my blog shortly.

Some of you will of course recognize this as two of the Jim Patterson Pet Rocks.