Point Lobos on California’s Big Sur coastline is a State Reserve that can keep a landscape photographer busy for days.
We decided to spend a day here on our recent California trip. I had been here on a couple of prior occasions, usually tacked on the end of a Yosemite trip. There are many coves like this with interesting rock formations and crashing surf opportunities. I spent many hours shooting various breaking surf compositions but none really worked for me that day primarily because we had a cloudless sky. Photographers call it a bald sky and although it’s a beautiful blue sky day it makes for boring photographs. Photographs with a lot of sky generally need nice clouds to create some visual interest otherwise it’s just an empty blue space in the image.
I switched from big vista style images to more medium scale to essentially eliminate the sky. What really caught my eye, and my ear, in this scene was the rushing surf up onto the pebbles of this cove. As the surf receded back into the ocean, it made an interesting sound across the pebbles. Almost like the pebbles were rolling down hill although they weren’t really. Much different than when across sand. As I watched and listened to the waves I was kind of mesmerized by the patterns of the surf and the accompanying sounds. I decided to try and capture that in an image.
First I eliminated as much of the sky as possible since it added no visual interest. Cropping the photo just above the rock formation on the upper right did the trick. I then played around with various shutter speeds to blur the water enough to create a sense of movement. Freezing the water in time with a fast shutter speed wouldn’t give the sense of movement I wanted. Conversely, a real long shutter speed would smooth it out too much and you wouldn’t see it as an individual wave. In this case 1/2 a second worked out to be just right. To achieve that on a bright sunny day required adding a six stop neutral density filter. Then it was a case of timing the waves and when to trip the shutter. I first tried catching the wave as it was receding since that’s when it made the interesting sounds. The image however didn’t look like a receding wave. So then I switched to catching it as it was coming in. That worked much better. Now, just do it 10-20 times and pick the one that looks best!
In post processing I had to do some people removal since several were standing on the large rock in the upper right. Pretty easy to do. I then needed to do some dodging and burning to balance the light between the rocks and the surf. Add in a little bit of dynamic contrast and you have what you see in the image above. Not a lot of work.
The image would have been a lot better had there been some nice clouds in the sky but you don’t always get that luxury. You make do with what nature gives you. It may not be a portfolio image but it’s not bad. Plus spending a beautiful day at Point Lobos is always worthwhile. Even if you don’t come away with a “keeper”.
Nikon D810 with Nikkor 24-70mm @ 26mm. F/8 at 0.5 second at ISO 64. Six stop ND filter.
