Tag Archives: highway

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

Cove, Haze, Evening Light

August 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Hazy sunset light on a small cove and successive ridges along the Pacific Coast Highway

The California Big Sur coast along the Pacific Coast Highway is a place of extraordinary beauty, but also light and conditions that change on a scale ranging from daily to seasonally. Summer often brings a lot of fog — enough fog to sometimes perplex and disappoint visitors who have seen photographs of beautiful summer vistas and imagine that they are the norm. They aren’t. Summer is the season of almost daily fog here. Fall and winter are more likely to provide those vistas, especially between the passage of great Pacific storms that sweep the atmosphere clear of fog and which may bring dramatic clouds. The “off-season” is also the time of the most impressive seascape, as those same winter storms can bring very high surf.

The foggy time of summer does have its attractions, especially when you become aware of the daily cycles. It is often foggy early in the morning, but the fog usually clears back to and beyond the coast later in the day. Photographing in the fog is special, though it can require you to look at the landscape in quite different ways. But as the fog clears you can follow the edges of the fog and light and discover all sorts of interesting and dynamic conditions. Once the fog does clear, the atmosphere often remains somewhat hazy. I know that some people think they want perfectly clear air, but I’ll take a bit of atmospheric haze over perfect clarity almost any day! This was a day of such haze, and very late in the day it began to glow in golden hour light and obscure the farthest parts of the seemingly unending series of Big Sur ridges dropping to the sea.

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

Rugged Coastline, Fog

August 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning fog clears from mountains above Soberanes Canyon along the rugged Big Sur coastline

This may be a familiar scene to people who are familiar with the upper section of California’s Big Sur coast below Monterey, where steep coastal mountains drop to the shoreline and where the climate oscillates on the boundary between sun and fog. This time I visited on a day when it was hot inland on the other side of the coastal mountains — it was perhaps 30 degrees color on the ocean side.

The scene is in a very specific area close to Soberanes Canyon, but it exemplifies scenes that can be found all along this spectacular coastline. Soberanes Canyon is a popular stopping place, with access to the ocean and to trails up into the steep canyon which extends to the left below the fog-shrouded summit near the top of this photograph. This section of the shoreline is not as high as some other sections in the area, but it is extremely rugged, with a steep, rocky bluff and scores of rocky sea stacks.

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

Western Horizon

August 11, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Thin clouds above afternoon sunlight reflected on the Pacific Ocean

This photograph begins a series from recent photographs of the Big Sur coast along the Pacific Coast Highway in California. After a week of being cooped up at home (which construction work was underway) I was itching to get out into the (more) real world, so I took a day for a long, all-day trip down this coast and back to make photographs. The trip reminded me of a lot of things, but among them was how wonderful it is, on a day of terrible inland heat, to be able to hug this coast where it remained cool and damp!

I’m one of those who is fascinated by the brilliant sunlit ocean surface and the way that it can recede towards an almost invisible horizon when the combination of light and atmospheric haze is just right. The high bluffs along this route can be excellent places to observe this and more.* At times the surface of the ocean takes on the appearance of molten metal and is almost too bright to look at. I always watch for these conditions when I am in this area, and I was not disappointed on this visit. In this scene, a group of passing thin clouds provides a visual counterpoint to the brilliant reflection on the ocean’s surface.

The “and more” I’m thinking of refers to an unbelievable California coastal experience that I shared with a number of other visitors at the end of this day. There are few other places in the world where you can pause at the top of cliffs hundreds of feet above the open sea at sunset, and watch for perhaps a half hour as a pod of gray whales assembles to feed, periodically breaching.

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

Rocky Beach, Cove, and Fog

July 25, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A rocky beach and cove on a foggy summer morning along the Big Sur coast

On July 4 (of all days!) I headed out rather early so that I could make it to the upper Big Sur coastline before the tourist traffic arrived. I succeeded, and there were very few people when I arrived on the foggy coast and drove slowly south while looking for photographs. It being a major holiday, within a few hours the Pacific Coast Highway was filled with visitors, and I turned around and headed back home.

I like several things about this photograph, and most of them have to do with the fact that, in many ways, there is little all that special about the scene. I’m not sure that I could even find this particular cove again, at least not without some careful searching — this coastline is almost a continuum of such places, and almost anywhere you stop and look around a bit you can find such scenes. The fog is another typical element, especially in the summer months, when many visitors are surprised to find that the beautiful sunny scenes that they have seen in photographs are the exception rather than the rule. A typical summer morning in this region? Fog! To many of us Californians, however, this is part of the appeal. On a day when only a few miles inland the temperatures were well into the ninety degree range and perhaps higher, along this coastline I could enjoy the welcome and cool and damp of the coastal fog.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: highway

Cove, Haze, Evening Light

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Rugged Coastline, Fog

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Western Horizon

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Rocky Beach, Cove, and Fog

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

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