• Benjamin Disraeli.

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When I first moved to the west coast, I was thinking my days of early sunrise shots were over. I am in the west now and sunset would be the ideal time for my perfectly lit coastal landscape shots. Then on a beautiful fall day we decided on a trip to see some coastal landscapes. It all went beautifully till about 4pm and then as sunset approached a thick layer of fog rolled in from the ocean and we just couldn’t see anything. I was confused on so many levels as this repeated the next three evenings. Later I leaned that the shots you see of stunning California coastal shots you see are mostly taken during the dead of winter as it’s the only season, the fog is reliably absent. I had posted a shot of the Bixby bridge that looks like a tropical paradise, but it was taken with me wearing three winter layers from head to toe.

We have driven the entire coastal roads of the west coast and found this to be mostly true except for the little bit of coast around San Diego. That’s the one spot where I have gotten brilliant sunset colors without any issue with fog. Its actually my second favorite spot only behind the American southwest for spectacular sunset shots. This shot was taken at the hospital bluffs at the La Jolla Cove north of San Diego. I only got like 4 shots here as there is a bit of limitations regarding compositions.

• Mother Teresa.

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It was by pure accident that I heard about the Hospital bluffs of La Jolla Cove near San Diego, California. When I saw the images from this location, we realized that while we have visited San Diego many times, we never visited La Jolla Cove. So we packed our backs and headed to this amazing little coastal town. We reached well in advance and Immediately saw that there were two coves with a considerable amount of marine life on display with a good amount of seals and sea lions playing in the water as well as resting on the beach and rocks. Near the cove side cliffs, there were also a good number of cormorants resting on the rocks.

Well, that meant that I spent all the time I had allocated to scouting, photographing cormorants and sea lions on the La Jolla Cove. So, when my wife warned me about the setting sun, we had to rush trying to find the hospital bluffs and found this place. I am not still hundred percent sure these are the bluffs that I was looking for. But what an amazing place to shoot a sunset. I took this shot about a minute after the sun went down and had to use about 4 stops of ND grad filters to balance the light difference between the foreground and the background. I also used a polarizer here as the rocks were incredibly wet and were creating lots of reflected light that messed with my metering. This is a single shot image in a very high dynamic range scene where the light was balanced with old-fashioned tools like ND grads and polarizers, very little software editing is actually done to this image. Another cool thing about this trip was that my wife took some stunning video footage of me photographing the bluffs and they are available at my Instagram profile.