Los Padres National Forest

• Augustus Hare.

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One more shot from Pfeiffer State Beach. Took this one as I reached the beach when I got about 2 minutes to shoot the bridge head on without anyone walking through the frame. I like this shot a little better than the one where the sun is setting through the arch.

Thanks for visiting. Hope you all have a good day..

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Big Sur

• Gustave Flaubert.

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Another shot from Sand Dollar beach. I took this shot just before sunset during the golden hour period when the sun was lighting up the shore magnificently. As always with Big Sur there was a hint of fog coming in from the Pacific too.

Thanks for visiting, have great day..

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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So finally after bugging my wife for a while she agreed to make a trip up to Big Sur with me to shoot the Pfeiffer beach at sunset. I have had the opportunity to shoot this beautiful natural bridge before and heard from many friends that January is the month to be here as you will be able to observe the setting sun through the arch of the Bridge.

Unfortunately for me, many of the photographers in the area had the same Idea and that combined with the fact that it was a long weekend just made the usually peaceful beach a hugely popular destination. I literally had to walk half a mile to the beach carrying my gear while my wife and sis-in-law tried to find parking. Anyways the fact that I got a glimpse of the sun just going down made it all worthwhile. So here is the money shot from the trip, I used a 86mm focal length along with sot metering to get this shot. Thanks for visiting my pictures..

• James Joyce.

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wow wow wow! so three days ago I had reached about 850k views on flickr and was wondering what I need to achieve a Million views by the end of the year 2014. Then I posted the Manhattan Beach Pier shot which got explored and flickr views went crazy. In three days I crossed over to a final tally, at the time of writing, of 1,057,039 views. I am truly blown away and awed by all the comments and interest on my photos. This is pretty awesome and thanks everyone for visiting and their kind words.

Here is another shot I took at the Big Sur trip. This was taken a soon as I reached the Pfeiffer beach, the sun was still high and the light was coming through the arch of the bridge as if coming from another portal illuminating the shadows in front of the bridge. Most of the photographers were positioned directly in front of the arch trying to get the shot I posted earlier so this one was pretty easy to take.

Thanks for visiting again..

• Michelangelo.

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The Day we visited Big Sur there was a massive car crash near the Bixby Bridge and there were cars backed up for miles without being able to go anywhere. Fortunately our hotel was well before the bridge so we just went to the Bixby Bridge vista point and then turned back to get to Pfeiffer beach to shoot the natural bridge.

• H. P. Lovecraft.

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I have talked about the Marine Layer in a couple of my earlier posts. Throughout my time on the west coast, I would head out on a trip to the pacific coast highway with a planned shot in min only to see the thick layer of fog roll in from the ocean just before sunset. First, I thought that my luck was just wrong. Then on a trip to Oregon, it happened again at Bandon beach. The day started warm and sunny only to end up with a completely grey sky in the afternoon, with near-freezing temperatures. Undeterred, I returned during sunrise, only to find that conditions haven’t improved. I still took some fantastic moody shots before meeting a couple walking their dog in the morning. We chatted a bit, and I asked about the fog front. They told me about the Marine Layer and how the cold water of the Pacific combined with the warm air from the land causes the formation of one of the most massive fog layers that envelops most of the western coastline of the United States. That’s also when I learned that for the fog to be absent, the temperature of both land and ocean needs to be close, and that means winter. In the case of Oregon, they tend to have very wet winters, so realistically its just September and October where you have a chance to getting some stunning color in the sky. This bit of info was quite a revelation to me, and I went back to my picture folder and checked my images to realize that the only fog-free shot of the coast that I have taken was during a January trip to Pfiefer Beach. It was my light bulb moment. But the Marine Layer is not all bad, the consistent fog is the reason why Coastal Redwoods grow to their massive height in northern California and southern Oregon. So they are alright in my book.

Now a bit about this shot, taken at the beautiful sand dollar beach, a half-mile long beach just north of the jade cove. Due to the unique crescent shape of the beach, it traps water from the currents, and then the summer sun warms them up nicely. On this trip, we stopped for lunch at the picnic area nearby but had the beach all to ourselves. After learning how warm the water was, we ended up spending the whole afternoon here. I have had this sea stack in mind for the sunset shot, and the clouds were positioned perfectly for a spectacular sunset. My plan was for a wide panorama, and as the sun was nearing the horizon, the fog layer rolled in completely hiding the sun and any chance of a great sunset. Being a relatively new photographer, I panicked rather than adjusting to the situation. To this day, I kick myself for not using my telephoto lens and getting some moody detail shots of those massive sea stacks.

Big Sur

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• Henry Ward Beecher.

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I have mentioned in some earlier posts about the challenges of shooting Big Sur. There are so many locations and so few facilities that you have to be meticulous about planning your trip. It took me 4 or 5 trips to figure this out. I also was lucky enough to meet some seasoned photographers and learn some excellent tips on the way. I learned about the keyhole arch and the Pfeiffer beach from one such seasoned pro. He was also kind enough to let me know that during January, the sunset can be viewed right through the arch.

I was super excited about the trip, and I didn’t think about adding any other location to the itinerary. We booked a camping location nearby and drove straight to the beach. The last part of the drive to the beach was a bit sketchy for our Mazda 3, but we managed to get to the parking lot. Unfortunately for me, a lot of photographers had the same idea as me, and prime locations to shoot the sunset were already gone. These guys and gals were waiting on the beach since the morning. So I wandered off looking for interesting compositions around the arch, and there were many to be found. This composition is to the right of the keyhole arch. The setting sun was giving beautiful color to the few clouds that lingered. I wanted to crop in a bit to freeze the wave action that was happening near the rocks.

Douglas MacArthur.

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One of my favorite shot from the Big Sur trip last weekend. I took this one at the Jade cove from the stairs leading sown to the beach. I had this shot in mind actually as soon as we went there. The only thing that I didn’t anticipate was a thin layer of fog which rolled in just as the sun was setting. I also knew it would be a bear to stitch the shots together when you have well defined wave patterns. I don’t know how it did it but finally my laptop spewed out this image which aligned everything beautifully.

Hope everyone likes it, thanks for visiting..

• Horace.

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Here is another shot from the Big Sur trip. This one I took on the second day of our trip, the day had mostly been about relaxing in one of the state beaches. I took this shot just before the sunset as the fog was rolling in from the ocean and Sun’s rays were peering above the rocks making the whole scene look kind of other worldly. I had to wait a lot to get the scene almost completely empty of beach goers and it was getting pretty cold by the time I took this shot. At home I had to use almost all of my laptop’s processing power to stitch together this shot out of 18 Nikon D800 images.

Thanks for visiting, hope you all have a great weekend ahead..