Its been a while since Ive been able to take some landscape/coastal shots and I had been itching to get back out with my camera. My photo buddy, Willie, noticed that the weather report called for clouds on the coast on Thursday and we packed our camera gear and drove over an hour around the bay and over to Pescadero to stop at one of his favorite beach spots: Bean Hollow Beach. The last time he was here he stumbled upon a Dead Whale that had washed ashore He managed to take this amazing photo before the crews arrived to bury it in the sand. When we arrived today you could still see part of its carcass above ground. I can officially say Ive now touched a whale
We spent a while scouting out places to shoot and I couldnt really find anything I was happy with. I had found a little tide-pool that I thought would be simple enough and might reflect the sunset colors. I setup my tripod and waited for sunset. The clouds were really far off and we kept praying theyd come closer and give us a beautiful sky — sure enough we got a great sunset but once the sky lit up I realized my tide-pool was a pretty boring shot with lots of distractions.
I noticed that the rocks behind the tide-pool was getting some nice spray so I moved my tripod over to this location and started firing away. After a couple of photos I realized a whole ton of spray had coated my filters and were ruining my shots. Being stupid, I left my micro-fiber cloth all the way on the other side of the rocks and I had to sprint to my camera bag and then sprint back to my camera before it got swept away Once the filters were cleaned I waited until two big consecutive waves rolled in and managed to get an incoming wave splash against the rocks while the previous wave was still trickling out.
Note: very little editing was done to this. I darkened the sky and then had to DE-saturate it so that it didnt seem so fake.
Nikon D300s w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S:
30mm, f/10, 0.5 sec, ISO 125, Tripod
Lee Foundation Kit Filter Holder
BW F-Pro Circular Polarizer, HiTech 0.9 Graduated ND, Hitech 0.9 ND Soft, and 0.6 ND Soft.
No HDR
