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.

Here is another photo from the beautiful Panther Beach where we are organizing a clean up this coming Sunday. For all details, please see my previous post.

As we were on our way out from Panther Beach where I shot recently together with Jim Patterson, I decided to take one more shot. The winds were strong and waves unpredictable (which always makes long exposures a bit tricky), so I decided to protect myself by hiding behind the rock, which turned out to be a composition I liked anyway. This is 102 seconds exposure, which still preserved a bit of texture in the ocean, yet smoothed out the clouds and the surf, emphasizing the odd texture of rocks.

Sadly, I read in the Mercury News couple days later that the same night we were there, in a beach nearby (just a few hundred yards away) a teenager Dennis Cyncor-McMillan drowned after going for a swim at 4am. You can see how rocky this shore is. There was a group of them hanging out at this beach as well as we were leaving, and it’s highly likely that the poor guy was among them and that we saw him on our way back to our cars. This was his last sunset. I was since in contract with his family, and they used this image during Dennis’ memorial service.

Here is a more traditional view of the the James ‘Sunny Jim’ Rolph Bridge, aka the Bay Bridge, taken on Embarcadero walkway right before sun appeared. It was a good place to start a day.

After trying shots at longer exposures when water is smooth and shorter exposures when waves are frozen in time, I decided to settle on a version of the image that’s in between, as this best captured how I felt about the mood that presented itself on that cold December morning.

On our last visit to Hawaii in November of 2007, we were lucky to stay with relatives of my wife who live right on the beach in in Kailua, on the island of Oahu. This was a view from their backyard, and I’m not kidding.

All I had to do to capture this was to get up at sunrise, get my butt out to the lawn, set up a tripod and fire away few shots. Why I didn’t do it for every sunrise, I do not know, but I now deeply regret it.

Point Lobos is one of my favorite places on Earth and I could not pass up on including this photo in my portfolio. I first visited it in 2000 during my first visit to the United States and it left a lasting impression on me. The luck had it that one day I would live within a driving distance to that State Park where Ansel Adams and Edward Weston often spend afternoons on walks and would teach workshops

From geological standpoint, there is a drop in the ocean floor off Point Lobos just few miles into the ocean which reaches levels typical of the mid Pacific Ocean. This results in an unusual wave pattern and a bounty of marine life close to the shore. It is a very popular spot for local divers, as well as photographers.

Big rocks abound in Point Lobos, and I set myself on one of them with a goal to capture the memorable waves that kept hitting on the rocks that night.

The question I get asked the most about this image has to do with the color of the light – was it natural? While I did shift the white balance slightly towards magenta during RAW conversion, that night the color is in the sky did have a magenta tint to it. This is not a phenomenon we see happen very often, but I did see similar tint of the clouds early in the morning last week after a storm, which reminded me that it does happen under the right conditions.