Though sun and fun and surf (and turf?) may be the core of the SoCal identity, even Pacific Beach gets a gray winter day.
Gray Day at Pacific Beach
Tag: Waves
The House by the Dunes
This lonely cottage by the dunes and brush of a late-autumn Atlantic beach reminds me of a half-remembered setting from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold near the start of the novel, on the Dutch coast. There’s a lonely quiet to the image but the road and house suggest some respite on the horizon.
A Return Trip to Brazil
New adventures in color grading have brought me back, much as I did with images from Spring 2012, to my Fall 2012 trip to Florianopolis, Brazil. Big changes in how I tackle challenging raw images have produced a drastically different outcome to my photoprocessing.
The dark rocks and chaotic waves come through in a whole different way.
So, too, does this sculpture stretched over the water—the purpose of which, if there is one, I’ve still not ascertained.
There’s a sense of texture and place that a dark ocean and bright beach convey together.
I can still remember wandering back to my room at the end of the evening, feeling like I was a visitor to an alien world.
From the Beaches of Florianopolis, Brazil
The beach pictures from La Jolla Shores inspired me to revisit some of my other past beach shots—but these are from a bit farther away: Florianopolis, Brazil.
Applying the same low-contrast processing really revealed a lot more of the details on the clifftop figures. I’m amazed when I compare these shots with similar ones I processed years ago. It’s amazing what a decade of practice can do!
Trio vs. Trio
I found myself returning to one of my earliest Decaseconds posts (almost exactly 11 years ago) as I updated my Top 32 album on Flickr—the digital portfolio where I display my best (or simply favorite) photographs. Finding “Waves and Rocks Dwarf Man” in that set, I saw both the excellent light and composition that my old Nikon had captured in 2011, as well as all of the places where my choices in processing the original image now left my unsatisfied. Rather than simply reprocessing that original image, I went back to the folder of camera raws from that day and selected an image I took just moments later to tackle. (Always keep save those raw files!) I not only like this composition better than the older one, but I also feel that I have brought something new out here, rather than simply reprocessing something old.
Watching the Waves in Brazil
Standing on the cliffs of Florianopolis, Brazil in spring is just the time to record a “picture postcard” image.
Saturday Afternoon on the Pier
Spending an afternoon on the pier in Pacifica, CA is as good a time as any. Crab fishing has its varied sets of tools and techniques, but the experience to me has been about more than that. Cooking on a portable hibachi and getting crusty with salt spray is the real core of the process.
Surf and Surf
North Carolina has beaches for miles.
California Coast II
Looking back on some of my earliest shots of the California coastline this evening: Light-leaked soft blues and golds are the colors. Is the soundtrack the jangle of surf music guitars or just the crashing of waves?
Saturnalia Sunset
One of my favorite times (of the entire year) for photography is after Christmas dinner. Life is slow and sedate, and it matched the placid(ish) rolls of the Gulf of Mexico perfectly. Even the shapes of people are soft and indistinct—an impressionist’s idea of a family playing in the waves. Spending the holidays in Florida has a certain appeal.
Beachtime
How do you write about a boy playing on the beach in southern Brazil without resorting to cliché? I’ll have to tackle it, in any case. Summer is ending, weekends at the beach are numbered, and I wanted to make a weekend post just to show this photograph that so effectively conveys the feeling of being the last person at the beach. Even when it’s time to go home, we can still hope for one more wave.
Crashing California Cliffs
Not far from Muir Woods, the Pacific coast cliffs of California are a starker, steeper, and foggier place than I expected. The nearly sheer cliff face, the scraggly trees hanging on for dear life, and the weather- (and person-) beaten railings make the whole place feel mythical. The fog density hit just the right soupiness on this particular day; we could just barely see and hear the waves crashing on the rocks below.
Sand Fortress IV
Another in my ongoing series of sand castle photographs (see I, II, and III), this shot comes from the gorgeous coast of southern Brazil. While everyone else is off playing in the surf, these two boys stayed behind on the beach to construct this complex of truly epic sand castles. (That sand castles are as wondrous and short-lived as childhood is perhaps too trite a metaphor for me to acknowledge in any way beyond the parenthetical.) I just love the universality of building sand castles on the beach–from the east coast to the west, and the from the northern hemisphere to the south, it’s a worldwide past time.
Pirate Island
As a child, I held on to the fantasy of discovering a secret island all my own–one stocked with secret forts and pirate treasure and relaxing fishing spots. During our trip to Brazil last fall, I was entranced by the rocky but just-the-right-sized islands off the coast of Florianopolis. If I could have only gotten out there, I know pirate treasure awaited me.
Crashing Wave Path
Far along the beach, the Atlantic waves crash against Brazilian stone. The Sun has just dropped behind the horizon, and I’m standing on these steps beyond a strange little pseudo-bridge and this odd sculpture. To this day, I’m still not sure whether it’s functional, or purely decorative.
Decaseconds 