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Holy Sunset, Batman! Hole in the Wall Beach Davenport, California I had a feeling that the skies last week would we worth a trip to the coast and I threw my camera gear into my trunk just in case. Sure enough, James called Willie on Wednesday afternoon and asked if we wanted to leave work early and head to Santa Cruz. I had to wear business attire to work that morning and forgot to bring a change of clothes with me so I forced to head out with suit slacks and a button down shirt on. Once we got to Santa Cruz we decided we'd head to Panther Beach. We arrived and scouted for a while but I quickly realized that most of the good compositions would be under water before the sun set. I decided to head through the hole in the rock and start scouting "Hole in the Wall Beach". A little over a year ago Willie and I went down to Hole in the Wall Beach, crossed through the hole and had a very boring sunset. What I didn't realize was that the tide had come in and when we went to go back through the hole to return to our car I mistimed things, got swept in a wave, taken partially out to sea, thrown against the rocks, and then finally managed to swim back to the beach and get out. While my camera bag stayed mostly dry I lost a D80, a 50mm f/1.8, my iPhone, and my work blackberry (thankfully Apple replaced my iPhone for free!) Fast forward to Wednesday and again, the tide was low when we arrived and coming into a 3ft high tide. James, Willie, and I crossed the hole and scouted out some locations. I decided to stay close to the hole and shoot some of the rock outcroppings. Lukas Wenger passed us as we scouted around and later Jim Patterson and Kendra walked by and I managed a quick "Hi!" before they continued on to the south part of the beach (personally, I found) it pretty neat to run into a famous photographer like Jim!) Wearing tall rain boots ended up being a true blessing. As the tide came in the spot where I had setup my tripod quickly filled with incoming waves; the boots kept me dry while I was able to take photographs as water came in and then retreated. I tried to find some movement of the water around the rocks. As the sun continued to set the sky filled up with more and more color. Turned out to be quite a nice sunset! And I was able to successfully return to my car without getting swept away! I've now successfully conquered Hole in the Wall beach!! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 17mm, f/18, 1.3 sec, ISO 125 HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND Grad
Skyrocket "Cripps Beach" Davenport, California Yesterday I checked the weather forecast and it looked like there were some nice clouds rolling in. I asked Willie if I should head home, grab my gear, and then hit the coast. Willie had been watching the weather satellite all day and it looked like the clouds disappeared as they hit Santa Cruz and he thought it wouldn't be a good day to go shoot. Instead of grabbing my gear I went to the gym and when I walked out of the gym at 5:30pm and looked up at the sky it was *on fire* with some amazing/blazing color. I banged my head against my car for a couple minutes as I watched the beautiful sunset die out. Today, determined not to make the same mistake again I packed up all my camera gear and threw it in the car … just in case the weather would hold out today and we'd get a nice sunset. Sure enough, at 2:30pm Willie tells me "I'm meeting James Wang at 2:50. Come if you want!" Of course! So I ditch work, hop in my car, and the 3 of us drive down to Santa Cruz. It was supposed to be high tide and James recommends we head on over to Cripps Beach (popular name because Joshua Cripps/Jim Patterson seem to be the first to photograph it). After parking, walking to the beach, and then climbing down the cliff (there was a rope attached to help out) we scouted around for a while. We walked along the beach for a while and Willie and I eventually found a nice little cove that had some interesting water currents rolling over the rocks. We setup and waited. Unfortunately the tide came in quicker than the sun set and our composition quickly became under water! Doh! Willie and I both left our spot and began to scout new locations. Willie stopped along a beach, and not wanting to take the same photo as Willie, I kept going. I had seen this little inlet earlier and now that the tide had risen a bit the composition looked much nicer than 30 minutes earlier. I noticed that there were some clouds further to the west so I moved south to face them. Sure enough 10 minutes after the sun had set the sky lit up! I wished the clouds had been a little bit closer to give us more color but there was some beautiful stuff going on along the horizon and for a minute or two the sky above me lit up as well. While snapping away I noticed a small plume of smoke rising out of the ocean. As I kept watching the sea I noticed that the plume was rising, and rising, and rising, until it eventually pitched and rolled and continued on an upward trajectory. A rocket!!! I just witnessed a rocket launch! I was pretty excited … especially since I work in a similar industry. When I got home I tried to look up what the launch was (I assumed it was from Vandenburg Airforce Base) but I couldn't find any rocket launches scheduled. Must have been some kind of missile test? Who knows. You can see the rocket in the photo, about ⅔ of the way to the right in this image, just above the horizon. Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 19mm, f/13, 3 sec, ISO 200 HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND Grad + HiTech 0.6 Soft Grad ND
Cracker Jack Davenport Beach Davenport, California This year happens to be the first year since the 1970's that Tioga Rd in Yosemite National Park has been open (it goes through Tuolumne Meadows) in January. All of the Yosemite high ground lakes are frozen but since there has been no snow this year the road stayed open! Willie and I had planned to spend the weekend in Yosemite and left early on Saturday morning; to keep this story short, about an hour into the drive I had to turn back and ended up spending the afternoon in the doc's office. Turned out I was so excited to get the photos that I had an anxiety attack! Yosemite didn't happen on Saturday :/ Instead, we noticed that there seemed to be some nice clouds hitting Santa Cruz and since the doc cleared me as healthy we headed to Davenport Beach. Davenport Beach is famous for the Davenport Crack, which you see below. I scouted around several areas and had actually been hoping to avoid the crack but I didn't like how the low tide exposed some rocks and settled on the crack. When I went back over to find a composition a lot of other photographers had already arrived, including Jared Ropelao! It was neat to finally meet a guy that I follow on flickr so frequently! I found a composition that I liked and decided I wanted to use the 2 walls between the crack to frame the photo. Unfortunately when I went to edit the photo I decided to crop out the right wall and I wished I had moved the camera more to the left so that the crack wouldn't be in the left half of the photo (yes, I realize the right half of this photo is boring). We didn't quite get the sunset we wanted but I did get to meet Jared, which was neat! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 17mm, f/11, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND, HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND
Willie and I had been itching to take some photos and the weather forecast called for partially cloudy skies in Santa Cruz so we decided to grab a 3rd friend and head down the coast to Davenport Pier. There used to be an entire pier here but for some reason or another it got taken down and just the pylons are left. To get down to the beach is fairly tricky -- there's a "trail" that heads down the cliff and in some parts it's *really* steep. It's a little bit like rock-climbing, although you're not hanging from the wall. I had heard people use rope to help out so I threw some in my bag before we left and tied it to a pole at the top and it helped us out a little. Getting down wasn't too bad as long as you had good footing. Getting up was almost easier, until the top, when I was glad I had attached the rope. Once we were on the beach I scouted around for a good composition. I find this place actually pretty hard to photograph … mostly because the sunset isn't exactly where you want it … and it's hard to get enough foreground interest to make the photo interesting. I started off way to the left because there was some interesting foam, but by the time sunset hit the foam was gone and the composition was ruined. I then moved to this spot because of the rocks in the foreground and its close proximity to the old pier pilons. I waited for some wave action and then captured it on its way out. Unfortunately, a big wave came in shortly after and took a couple of those rocks with it, so that composition was now done. All those clouds we had hoped for never came in and the sky was pretty boring. When we got home it was pretty clear that in order to get something decent I was going to have to do quite a bit of post-processing work. I call this an "artograph" because I had to stitch several photos together and then do some heavy processing to get it to look like this. I found several shots I had taken with different cloud positions and blended them together to get a more interesting sky. My original composition was a little too tightly cropped and I found another photo that I could get some sky back on the top and blended that in. Because that photo increased the height of the photo I had to use content-aware fill to add some size to the right side of the photo and to keep the proper 3:2 dimensions. Then I played around with the white balance temperature and tint to bring out some purple color in the sky. What do you guys think? Too overdone? Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 24mm, f/14, 1.3 sec, ISO 100, Tripod HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND, HiTech 0.6 Soft Grad ND
Spotlight Pfeiffer Beach Big Sur, California One of the coolest shots along the CA coast-line occurs during December/January every year: the sun just happens to set at just the right spot that a light-beam peeks through Pfeiffer Arch at Pfeiffer State Beach in Big Sur, CA. If the light beam happens to hit a splash of water it can also light up the spray. Willie, Celina, and I arrived about 2.5 hours prior to sunset to get the prime location. We heard a rumor that a workshop would be there and we wanted to beat them to the good spots. We were the firsts to arrive, picked the best composition that we could find and waited. About 45 minutes before sunset the light beam started to show up. At first it was just a faint beam but about 20 minutes before sunset it really started to glow orange and red. We waited for a large wave to come through the arch and create a lot of mist and spray which would catch in the light and make the beam visible. Luckily for us there was a strong surf and about 15 minutes before sunset the light beam just lit up like crazy. I snapped away as fast as I could to make sure I captured it. About 15 seconds later this large beam was gone. There continued to be beams all the way until about sunset but they were never as big as this one. Despite the fact that the D700 is supposed to have slightly better dynamic range than the Canon 5D Mark II, Willie kept getting great exposures all in 1 shot while I couldn't seem to avoid clipping if I exposed the rocks properly. In order to get this shot I had to expose one photo for the light beam and then a much darker exposure to capture the suns reflection off the splashes. I also blended a 3rd image in to keep the foreground rocks a bit sharper than the f/9 original exposure produced. My apologies to the people behind us who were hoping to get a shot of the entire Pfeiffer Arch (wide angle). We setup early so we could get our shot and we knew that the light would only get better and didn't want to lose our spot by moving. I guess it worked out because a bunch of other photographers ended up moving close to us and at that point there was no way the guy who wanted to shoot wide was going to get his shot :( Sorry again! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 62mm, f/9, 1/10 sec, ISO 160, Tripod No filters, NOT an HDR
Pink Phoenix Arroyo Burro Beach ("Hendry's Beach") Santa Barbara, California Just as I was about to leave and call it a night I realized that there was this GORGEOUS U shaped (Bird Shaped?) cloud behind me. I turned around, setup the photo, and took a couple "sample" photos. The light was fading fast and I really wanted to capture this with my brand new Lee Big Stopper. I setup everything, set my remote timer to a 5 minute exposure, and clicked start. 5 minutes later I looked at the photo and it was completely black! My calculations had shown it should have been way long enough -- turns out I forgot to put the camera on BULB mode so the shot was only 30 seconds long. Ick -- there went my perfect shot. Turns out that one of my 30 second photos (this one) while I was testing the settings and setting up, ended up being a really nice photo. The color quickly faded after my failed 5 minute attempt and I was really lucky to have captured this as it lit up from the sunset.
Through a friend at work I got hooked up with another friend at work who's really into photography. I thought I was into photography but Willie is *really* into it, and I might be a little jealous. He's the guy who figures out the best light, the best time of day, the best day, and does all the calculations to figure out where to be and when. I went to Yosemite with him last month to shoot Horsetail Falls and I was able to make it over to Half Moon Bay with him to shoot sunset at Gray Whale Cove on Friday. The photoshoot almost got cancelled because of the (sad) earthquake in Japan. The tsunami hit California in the morning and most of the beaches were closed but by sunset we were able to hit the coast and catch some big waves. I arrived at Gray Whale Cove and Willie was already setup with his super wide lens for the perfect photo. His shot (see Flickr) came out great, but mine, with my less wide lens, is what it is. I'm not too happy with it and I had to do some fancy post-processing to get this to work but the final product isn't too bad. This is a blend of 2 photos (not an HDR): I took an under-exposed photo to get the sunset, and took a normal photo to get the water motion. Willie really taught me how useful it is to have a good set of filters (graduated filters) with a filter holder. Time to go spend some of that good hard earned cash (hey, maybe I'll win the lottery and buy some gear and donate the rest to charity?). I liked this photo because the moving water shows some movement through the photo that draws your eye through this.
Whale's Last Touch Gray Whale Cove Half Moon Bay, California While digging through my archives the other day I came upon some of my Gray Whale Cove photos that I hadn't posted. I also noticed I had this photo which I had dismissed but a couple months later, I'm starting to digg. I've really been trying to get away from HDR now that I bought a set of ND Grad Filters but this shot became an HDR due to the fact that I *didn't* have filters during this photo shoot and I was going to miss the sunset in the sky if I didn't exposure blend. I love the movement of the water in this shot, but in my original version of this I thought the rocks had a little bit too much HDR feel. I went back and re-edited this to blend in the normal exposure rocks and make it more life-like. Back in March I went on over to Gray Whale Cove in Half Moon Bay to shoot sunset. The photoshoot almost got cancelled because of the (sad) earthquake in Japan that had happened a couple days prior. The tsunami hit California in the morning of our photoshoot and most of the beaches were closed, but by sunset we were able to hit the coast and catch some big waves. I arrived at Gray Whale Cove and Willie was already setup with his super wide lens for the perfect photo. This is a blend of 2 photos (not an HDR): I took an under-exposed photo to get the sunset, and took a normal photo to get the water motion. During this photo shoot I realized how useful a filter holder and set of graduated filters really was. Willie got some great shots and all I got was a blown out sky! It was this photoshoot that convinced me to go buy my set of soft ND grads. After taking the photos by a set of rock outcroppings at sunset I decided I wanted to try a different spot with water going over the rocks. You couldn't really see much of the colorful sunset, since there wasn't much color in the sky, but I did take a couple photos and came out with this one. I liked the finished product. Nikon D300s w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 28mm, f/10, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod
Through a friend at work I got hooked up with another friend at work who's really into photography. I thought I was into photography but Willie is *really* into it, and I might be a little jealous. He's the guy who figures out the best light, the best time of day, the best day, and does all the calculations to figure out where to be and when. I went to Yosemite with him last month to shoot Horsetail Falls and I was able to make it over to Half Moon Bay with him to shoot sunset at Gray Whale Cove on Friday. The photoshoot almost got cancelled because of the (sad) earthquake in Japan. The tsunami hit California in the morning and most of the beaches were closed but by sunset we were able to hit the coast and catch some big waves. I arrived at Gray Whale Cove and Willie was already setup with his super wide lens for the perfect photo. His shot (see Flickr) came out great, but mine, with my less wide lens, is what it is. I'm not too happy with it and I had to do some fancy post-processing to get this to work but the final product isn't too bad. This is a blend of 2 photos (not an HDR): I took an under-exposed photo to get the sunset, and took a normal photo to get the water motion. Willie really taught me how useful it is to have a good set of filters (graduated filters) with a filter holder. Time to go spend some of that good hard earned cash (hey, maybe I'll win the lottery and buy some gear and donate the rest to charity?). After taking the photos by the rock at sunset I decided I wanted to try a different spot with water going over the rocks. You couldn't really see much of the colorful sunset, since there wasn't much color in the sky, but I did take a couple photos and turned this HDR (I hate doing HDR's these days but this photo needed it … to get the sky and the movement in the water). I liked the finished product. This one is kinda boring since you can't see the sunset at all, but i liked the movement in the water. See the next photo for the zoomed in water movement/water-falls.
Cracker Jack
Davenport Beach
Davenport, California

This year happens to be the first year since the 1970's that Tioga Rd in Yosemite National Park has been open (it goes through Tuolumne Meadows) in January. All of the Yosemite high ground lakes are frozen but since there has been no snow this year the road stayed open! Willie and I had planned to spend the weekend in Yosemite and left early on Saturday morning; to keep this story short, about an hour into the drive I had to turn back and ended up spending the afternoon in the doc's office. Turned out I was so excited to get the photos that I had an anxiety attack! Yosemite didn't happen on Saturday :/

Instead, we noticed that there seemed to be some nice clouds hitting Santa Cruz and since the doc cleared me as healthy we headed to Davenport Beach. Davenport Beach is famous for the Davenport Crack, which you see below. I scouted around several areas and had actually been hoping to avoid the crack but I didn't like how the low tide exposed some rocks and settled on the crack.

When I went back over to find a composition a lot of other photographers had already arrived, including Jared Ropelao! It was neat to finally meet a guy that I follow on flickr so frequently! I found a composition that I liked and decided I wanted to use the 2 walls between the crack to frame the photo. Unfortunately when I went to edit the photo I decided to crop out the right wall and I wished I had moved the camera more to the left so that the crack wouldn't be in the left half of the photo (yes, I realize the right half of this photo is boring). We didn't quite get the sunset we wanted but I did get to meet Jared, which was neat!

Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S:
17mm, f/11, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod
HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND, HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND
Cracker Jack Davenport Beach Davenport, California This year happens to be the first year since the 1970's that Tioga Rd in Yosemite National Park has been open (it goes through Tuolumne Meadows) in January. All of the Yosemite high ground lakes are frozen but since there has been no snow this year the road stayed open! Willie and I had planned to spend the weekend in Yosemite and left early on Saturday morning; to keep this story short, about an hour into the drive I had to turn back and ended up spending the afternoon in the doc's office. Turned out I was so excited to get the photos that I had an anxiety attack! Yosemite didn't happen on Saturday :/ Instead, we noticed that there seemed to be some nice clouds hitting Santa Cruz and since the doc cleared me as healthy we headed to Davenport Beach. Davenport Beach is famous for the Davenport Crack, which you see below. I scouted around several areas and had actually been hoping to avoid the crack but I didn't like how the low tide exposed some rocks and settled on the crack. When I went back over to find a composition a lot of other photographers had already arrived, including Jared Ropelao! It was neat to finally meet a guy that I follow on flickr so frequently! I found a composition that I liked and decided I wanted to use the 2 walls between the crack to frame the photo. Unfortunately when I went to edit the photo I decided to crop out the right wall and I wished I had moved the camera more to the left so that the crack wouldn't be in the left half of the photo (yes, I realize the right half of this photo is boring). We didn't quite get the sunset we wanted but I did get to meet Jared, which was neat! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 17mm, f/11, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND, HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND" href="javascript:openLB(1674256033,'',XLarge,'',1024,683);">Cracker Jack Davenport Beach Davenport, California This year happens to be the first year since the 1970's that Tioga Rd in Yosemite National Park has been open (it goes through Tuolumne Meadows) in January. All of the Yosemite high ground lakes are frozen but since there has been no snow this year the road stayed open! Willie and I had planned to spend the weekend in Yosemite and left early on Saturday morning; to keep this story short, about an hour into the drive I had to turn back and ended up spending the afternoon in the doc's office. Turned out I was so excited to get the photos that I had an anxiety attack! Yosemite didn't happen on Saturday :/ Instead, we noticed that there seemed to be some nice clouds hitting Santa Cruz and since the doc cleared me as healthy we headed to Davenport Beach. Davenport Beach is famous for the Davenport Crack, which you see below. I scouted around several areas and had actually been hoping to avoid the crack but I didn't like how the low tide exposed some rocks and settled on the crack. When I went back over to find a composition a lot of other photographers had already arrived, including Jared Ropelao! It was neat to finally meet a guy that I follow on flickr so frequently! I found a composition that I liked and decided I wanted to use the 2 walls between the crack to frame the photo. Unfortunately when I went to edit the photo I decided to crop out the right wall and I wished I had moved the camera more to the left so that the crack wouldn't be in the left half of the photo (yes, I realize the right half of this photo is boring). We didn't quite get the sunset we wanted but I did get to meet Jared, which was neat! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 17mm, f/11, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND, HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND
Cracker Jack
Davenport Beach
Davenport, California

This year happens to be the first year since the 1970's that Tioga Rd in Yosemite National Park has been open (it goes through Tuolumne Meadows) in January. All of the Yosemite high ground lakes are frozen but since there has been no snow this year the road stayed open! Willie and I had planned to spend the weekend in Yosemite and left early on Saturday morning; to keep this story short, about an hour into the drive I had to turn back and ended up spending the afternoon in the doc's office. Turned out I was so excited to get the photos that I had an anxiety attack! Yosemite didn't happen on Saturday :/

Instead, we noticed that there seemed to be some nice clouds hitting Santa Cruz and since the doc cleared me as healthy we headed to Davenport Beach. Davenport Beach is famous for the Davenport Crack, which you see below. I scouted around several areas and had actually been hoping to avoid the crack but I didn't like how the low tide exposed some rocks and settled on the crack.

When I went back over to find a composition a lot of other photographers had already arrived, including Jared Ropelao! It was neat to finally meet a guy that I follow on flickr so frequently! I found a composition that I liked and decided I wanted to use the 2 walls between the crack to frame the photo. Unfortunately when I went to edit the photo I decided to crop out the right wall and I wished I had moved the camera more to the left so that the crack wouldn't be in the left half of the photo (yes, I realize the right half of this photo is boring). We didn't quite get the sunset we wanted but I did get to meet Jared, which was neat!

Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S:
17mm, f/11, 0.6 sec, ISO 200, Tripod
HiTech 0.9 Reverse ND, HiTech 0.9 Soft Grad ND
See photo in original gallery.
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