Category Archives: Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Big Sur Coast Near Bixby Bridge

July 8, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Black and white photograph of Big Sur coastline near Bixby Creek

A trip to the Big Sur coast last week got me thinking again about the photographic possibilities of that area, and about the fact that I need to photograph there more often! I’ve visited this coast since I was a child, and perhaps because it is so familiar to me I tend to overlook it, even though it is close enough that I can be there and back in less than a day.

In addition to my more recent visit, I was there much earlier this year, back in winter when we visited in late January. So, thinking about Big Sur this week, it seemed like a good time to start going back through those older photographs to see what emerged. (While I often share some photographs immediately after shooting a subject, I also like to revisit the images months or even a year or more later, when I think I can see them more clearly for what they are sometimes.) As I looked at these older photographs they seemed to me to have potential as monochrome images, and I ended up interpreting several of them that way. This photograph was made in the morning, and from a fairly iconic overlook in the upper section of the Big Sur coast, where ridge after ridge descends to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Point Sur

July 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Pacific Ocean surf at the Point Sur Lighthouse near the mouth of the Little Sur River.

Point Sur is a dramatic landmark along the Big Sur coastline of California south of the Monterey area, standing apart from the main land mass and attached to it by a low peninsula with sand dunes and a beach facing north toward the Pacific. Virtually every time I have passed by here the wind has been howling, often kicking up clouds of ocean spray, or else it has been fogged in. The lighthouse itself sits near the right end of the point, as seen in this photograph, with other buildings along the highest ridge. I have yet to visit the historic structure, but I often stop along this section of the coast and try to photograph the point.

I made this photograph on a winter day when those strong winds were blowing and the winter seas were battering the north facing beach. This time I looked for a higher vantage point that would show the line of surf approaching the beach and include the silhouette of the coastal hills and bluffs at the edge of the sea. This image languished in my archive for nearly half a year before I returned to this set of images and saw that it could work in a monochrome rendition, and that this might even be a more dramatic way to show this scene.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

July 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Steep cliffs fall to the edge of the Pacific Ocean along the fog-shrouded Big Sur coastline

I left very early on this Fourth of July morning, while the streets were still nearly empty near my home, and headed south towards Monterey and the Big Sur coast. I watch weather forecasts carefully before going there this time of year. The most likely conditions are not my favorites for photography — either socked in with coastal for or else blue-sky clear. I’m looking for something in between in the summer, which ideally means that there is still some fog around but that the sun is poking through along the edges. The forecast today was one of those that is peculiar to California, with fog hugging the coast early but breaking up by midday and the temperatures in the inland areas, which are sometimes only a few miles from the foggy areas, rising into the nineties. Hoping to find that sun/fog boundary, I was willing to chance the holiday traffic, though I figured I might beat the worst of it by going there before “normal people” were awake, and then by returning at about the time the crowds would show up.

I hit fog in the Salinas Valley, which meant that the fog on the coast was likely to be a bit more obstinate about leaving than I had hoped. In fact, there was a low deck of fog perhaps only a few hundred feet above the ocean, with misty atmosphere below. This is not easy light to photograph, at least not for me, but I found a few places like this one where I could get a clear view of nearby subjects and include more distant subjects disappearing into the fog. I walked out on the bluff to find this spot, set up, and noticed that the fog was in motion, so I decided to wait, eventually spending perhaps 20 minutes waiting and watching for moments like this when the fog thinned just enough to barely reveal the further rocks and coast.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: San Francisco

Five Ships, Abandoned Piers

July 3, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Five ships sit at anchor beyond abandoned piers, San Francisco Bay

This will likely be the final in this series of (mostly) black and white photographs featuring this dilapidated pier (piers, actually) along the San Francisco waterfront in the China Basin area. I’ve shared several others recently, but yesterday as I was preparing some prints for a meet-up with some fellow photographers in San Francisco, I took another look at this one and saw that it could work with a more panoramic format.

The ships parked on the horizon probably don’t suggest San Francisco to most people, but it is very common to see them moored out in the San Francisco Bay, where I imagine that they must “park” before or after being offloaded. Quite a few seem to be tankers of some sort. I’ve been intrigued by these ships for some time, and the linear arrangement of five of them on this morning, when fog and backlight made the hills on the other side of the Bay disappear, almost seems a bit mysterious. The piers are also fascinating. They have obviously been there for a long time and just as obviously have been allowed to deteriorate to the point that portions seem to have simply fallen into the water, and it looks like the Bay will ultimately reclaim all of them.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Big Sur Coast Near Bixby Bridge

Point Sur

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

Five Ships, Abandoned Piers

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.