Winter dusk light and clouds over the Pacific Ocean at Carmel Highlands near Yankee Point, Pacific Coast Highway, California.
This is the companion image to the black and white photograph I posted yesterday, Before I made the exposures that I used to create that black and white landscape-orientation image, I first made a quick series of bracketed exposures in portrait mode. As I photographed, I knew that the dynamic range was going to be too large for a singe exposure so I quickly made a series of four exposures, from which I selected two that have blended to produce this image.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
A Carmel Highlands cypress trees stands at the edge of a cliff above the Pacific Ocean and Yankee Point at dusk.
Oddly, this is a photograph that sort of “didn’t make the cut” the first time I went through the batch shortly after making the photographs in early 2010. I had spent the afternoon photographing further south in the Big Sur area and several other photographs from the set turned out more as I expected – and this one seemed like a sort of problem child photograph, so I didn’t take the time needed to work with it. Eventually I forgot about it as I went on to other projects.
The photo had been almost a bit of a grab shot. As I was heading north back up the coast, thinking I had finished my shooting and was now on the way home, I was stunned to catch a glimpse of some intense post-sunset light as I rounded the bend at the head of this cove in Carmel Highlands. I wasn’t certain that I could find a composition and work out a photograph in the brief interval the probably remained before the light faded, but I quickly put on the wide angle zoom, attached the camera to the tripod, and headed over to the edge of the bluff. Exposure was a terrible problem because the brilliant and very colorful sky was quite bright, while the close side of the foreground tree was nearly black. I made managed to shoot the scene a few times, shifting from landscape to portrait mode and making three bracketed exposures of each composition.
When I got home and looked at the raw files I think I decided that it was just going to be too much work for too little reward, and I instead went to work on more promising shots from earlier in the afternoon. This week I came upon the series of shots again and wondered what I could do with them. My first inclination was to go with the color, and I did come up with a portrait orientation image in color that I will probably post before long. Then, as I began to work on the landscape mode image, I started to see it as having potential as a monochrome image. I tried it. I liked it. And here it is!
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
“Abandoned Pier, Dusk” — The pilings of a long-abandoned pier on the Pacific coast near Davenport, California.
Besides being a matter of hours from the Sierra Nevada and less than a day’s drive from places like Death Valley, I can be at the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz in barely more than a half hour. Yesterday it looked like evening conditions might be interesting so I headed over there in the late afternoon. As I crossed the mountains on my way there I was pleasantly surprised to see low clouds over the ridges and some higher clouds over towards the ocean, which got my hopes up for some sort of spectacular evening light. However, when I actually got the the coast the conditions were not as interesting – mostly clear with just a bit of cloudiness on the horizon, and no interesting haze or mist over the water. Either that or I just wasn’t “seeing it” this time. So, after stopping for a cup of coffee, I headed up the coast from Santa Cruz and stopped at several of the usual locations, but didn’t make a single exposure. At the northernmost point on my drive I stopped right by the water and it looked like interesting light might be five or ten minutes away… and then the sun dropped below some low clouds near the horizon and the light died!
I think I’ve learned to go with the flow when this happens. I react in several ways. One is to look around for subjects other than those that I thought I was there for. With that in mind I thought about photographing shore birds… but there was only one forlorn seagull down near the water. I saw an interesting pool of water on the beach and thought it might play into a seascape photograph, but the flat light and cloudless sky was not working. I remembered a spot a bit further south where I had once shot some shoreline shoals from the top of a steep cliff at sunset, so I quickly drove up that way… and couldn’t find them!
I had one final thought. On the way north I had seen a group of photographers on the bluff near the northern edge of Davenport. I had stopped, leaving my camera equipment in the car, and quickly dashed out to where they were set up to see what was so interesting. Below their position were the four remaining supports from an old pier that washed away many years ago. It looked interesting and I recognized the structure from photographs that others have made from down on the beach – but I hadn’t been up for the steep descent to the beach so I had driven on after making a mental note about a position from which I thought a photograph might be made. Now I realized that if I went straight there that I might be able to make some long exposures in the dying light and perhaps frame them so that they only contained the structures and the open sea. So, off I went.
I arrived just before the moment of sunset and, sure enough, the group of photographers I had seen earlier was still there. I grabbed my gear and quickly walked out to the point I had scoped out earlier, which was some distance from where they were set up. I framed up this composition and then photographed right though sunset until there wasn’t really enough light to keep shooting. (The group at one point looked like they thought the show was over and they were going to leave, but I think they saw me continuing to shoot and decided to stick around almost as long as I did.) The light just kept getting more interesting as it faded. Although it was too dark to really see the image as it appears here, I knew that this three minute exposure (intentionally lengthened by choosing a small aperture and low ISO) would smooth out the surface of the water but still show the shadows and reflections of the old pilings.
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Plants grow in cracks in the sandstone along the shore of Weston Cove, Point Lobos State Reserve, California.
On this visit to Point Lobos, a place I photograph frequently, I wasn’t quite sure what conditions I would encounter. A Pacific weather front was approaching and I thought that I might encounter dismal, overcast conditions – but I was surprised to find it mostly sunny when I arrived. Even better, high, thin clouds were approaching the coast line and soon muted the direct sunlight, which made photographing these shoreline rock formations a more reasonable possibility during the late morning.
I’m pretty familiar with Point Lobos in general at this point, having visited the place from the time I was a child. I’m especially familiar with Weston Beach (or “cove,” as I like to think of it), with its circular shape, protective rock barrier, angled sandstone edges, and large pebbly “sand.” But as familiar as I am with this location, I almost alway find something new if I look around carefully enough, and these plants growing in the angular cracks in the sandstone were new to me.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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