San Diego County

• 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.

• William Arthur Ward.

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Another shots from Fonts point at Anza Borrego desert6 state park. This one was taken just as the sun was going down the hills. I was not very excited about taking the shot directly at the sun but the ridge line was just too pretty not to take the shot.

Thanks for visiting and have a nice day..

• Novalis.

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The desert is a fascinating location for photography. The word often brings images of drab featureless landscape, but that’s seldom true. The first Desert I officially visited in the United States was at the Joshua Tree National Park, which is home to the hotter Colorado desert to the east and a cooler but drier the Mojave Desert to the north. The Joshua Trees are endemic to the Mojave Desert ecosystem.

During my first visit, I had a sensory overload and had a terrible time getting good images. It's hard not to go for an apparent wide-pano shot that captures the vastness of the place. After quite a bit of repeated visits, I learned a secret, the photographic interest of the Desert is not the color of the golden hour but the texture of its elements. I also learned that the late evening or early morning light works better along with standard or short tele. A desert is one of the best places to break out your tele focal lengths.

Today's shot was taken at one of SoCal's signature desert landscapes, Fonts Point at the Anza Borrego Desert. We were hoping for sunset but had reached way earlier than anticipated. So, I spend some time playing around with focal lengths isolating some of the landmarks visible from our high vantage point.

• Aeschylus.

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I first read about the sunset cliffs of San Diego completely by accident but once I saw some pictures of the place, me and my wife agreed that this is a place that we need to visit. Since we live close it was just a 2-hour drive and adding to the trip was some of the great sushi places that are home to San Diego. So, we decided to make a day of it. The goal was to start early and make the two-hour drive to get to sunset cliffs well before sunset. Well, it didn’t go according to plans. On a Saturday that we planned the drive down south, there was a huge pileup on 405 and it literally turned into a parking lot while the emergency crews worked on clearing the debris. We lost hours on the road and what seemed like a 2 to 3 hour trip turned out costing us way more time than we previously thought.

The one thing that kept me from going nuts was the promise of a great sunset as the sky that day was full of clouds that every photographer dreams off. Finally, the traffic eased up and allowed us to reach our destination but just as we parked the sun went behind the horizon robbing us of the sunset shot. But there was still a lot of color in the sky and I managed to find some potholes that this location is famous for to use as foreground interest. The interesting thing about this image was that the light completely messed with my camera that day and the auto white balancing was completely thrown off. Thankfully I was shooting raw instead of jpegs and I was able to correct the white balance later. I used a two stop ND grad to get the sky a bit dimmer to match the ground which was darker. I didn’t use a polarizer as I wanted a reflection of the sky in the puddles.

• 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.

• Robert Quillen.

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Recently while going over some of my old shots, I came across this picture taken at the Anza Borrego desert in Southern California. I made this trip five years ago while still living in LA, and it was a casualty of my quick image selection process. I took a lot of stitch panoramas at this location, which ended up being my focus while post-processing, and then I moved on too quickly, leaving gems like this behind.

In the past two years that I have been going through my images, I have found quite a few great shots like these, and I have decided to make some updates to my photo selection workflow. In the past year or so, I have concluded that while we switched over from film to digital photography, we have also started the process of mindlessly taking images. While the run and gun style has caused a lot of problems, it has also created a massive problem cataloging the sheer amount of images that you have created from each photo outing. It got so bad for me that I started using Adobe Bridge tool to manage the sheer number of photos I have in my media folder.

I have adopted a new workflow for cataloging my images using the file rating and keyword features that are built into adobe products, and the difference is impressive. Especially with wildlife photography where each outing process creates tons of shots. If you are a photographer having a hard time managing your images, I implore you to take a look at these workflow enhancements. It will make your life so much easier.

• Ernst Fischer.

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Another incredible Ricardo Breceda sculpture from Anza Borrego Desert State Park. This one is of a Gomphothere, an extinct elephant-like animals, whose fossilized remains have been found in the area. The sculptures are not just of prehistoric animals, there are many scenes from the west are also immortalized as beautiful rusty sculptures.

I hope to return here again possibly during spring to see the wildflower blooms. If you are ever in the are these beautiful sculptures are a must see..

• E. Stanley Jones.

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Another shot from Fonts point, for once we had actually reached the location on time and after taking the sunset shots my wife and I were goofing around taking random portraits of us together. I started to notice the nice pink glow in the background, along with haze think enough to cut. So I setup the camera again for some more shots of the incredible badlands formations. These are the results of that particular try.

Thanks for visiting hope you all like it.

• Pablo Picasso.

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Its really cool when you get one of your pictures into flickr explore, suddenly your viewership spikes and one gets a lot of feedback about an image. The feedback I got from my last post was nothing short of amazing. Thanks everyone for your kind words and encouragement. Today's shot is of one of the many statues that adorn the Anza Borrego desert, this one is named Dragon of the Desert. I wish I had better lighting conditions for this shot and hopefully I get to be back here again.

Thanks again for visiting my stream, hope you all have a good day..

A lone sailboat glides across the horizon. This location is close to my home, so has been one of my favorite places to visit at sunset this year.

This past weekend I was in San Diego for a quick trip and I managed to squeeze in one night for photography. I had been meaning to re-capture the...

Another shot from my recent trip to San Diego. This is taken along the shores at Nicholson point near La Jolla. I really felt like I came away with a...

The San Diego skyline as seen from across the harbor in Coronado.

This image is a stitch of four originals, each of which was captured multiple...

-Agnes Martin.

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On our last trip to San Diego, one of the resident photographers suggested visiting the Mormon temple of San Diego and photographing the architecture. When we visited and realized it’s a truly imposing structure. What was truly surprising was the two young girls who were the church representatives who helped us by showing the best views of the temple and told us the entire history of the church. They even showed us the pictures of other massive Mormon church's. That was such a departure from other sites which often view photographers and tripod suspiciously that includes even the Getty Museum.

Hope you all like it..

• Ambrose Bierce.

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Here is another shot from the Thanks giving day weekend. This shot was made at the sunset cliffs location just after sunset. We got into one of those gridlocks that socal is famous for and only reached this location just after sunset. So I had little time to hunt for good foreground interests and get myself familiar with the location, but the incredible cloud formation and light more than made up for it. Thanks for visiting.

• Stephen Hawking.

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Last weekend we decided to finally tackle one nearby location that was forever in our radar. We have been hoping to visit the Anza Borrego desert for a long time and even made the drive once but we severely under calculated the distance and ended up at the park after sunset.

So this time we started early and reached the park visitor center in time. But rangers were not very confident in our ability to make the Fonts Point drive, so we decided to see the massive sculptures dotting the desert landscape. Anyways after spending an hour shooting the sculptures, my wife got bored and suggested we tackle the fonts point drive. I was skeptical about my offroading abilities as the entire 9 mile roundtrip is done on a dried up riverbed in deep sand. Turns out I was worried over nothing, as our Subaru outback just came alive as soon as we left the pavement, the steering become lighter and it just was a breeze to navigate the offroad path.

We reached the point about 45 mins before sunset and had the place all to ourselves. This shot is a panorama stitch image made at the point looking south towards Mexico which I read was visible on a clear day. The formations remind me of Zabriskie point at Death Valley national park, only less vivid but much bigger in scale. I am glad we finally got to visit this beautiful location. Hope you all like the image.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton.

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Truly awesome feeling to be in Flickr Explore again, especially to be in the top 3. Today's shot is of the badlands formations of Anza Borrego desert state park. I used a medium tele-lens to capture some of the details of the amazing formations.

Thanks for all the comments and encouragements, hope ya'll like it..

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