Wind & Sea

Once again, Sunny San Diego lends itself to beautiful photographic places. While on my trip, I made it to the beach. The beach is named 'Wind & Sea', and is in scenic La Jolla. There are huge boulders on the beach that have had waves and wind pounding them for who knows how long. There are all sorts of caves and formations because of it that are fun to explore in and shoot pictures of. I was fortunate to have my wife and child on the trip with me, which made the beach even more fun. The best part about it is that where I live, it was freezing cold and snowing while I was romping around on the beach with my family with no shoes on!

My child's feet in the sand. It was fun to see her experience the beach. It's her second time there, but my first time there with her. We had a lot of fun chasing seagulls and being chased by the tide!

I have to give my wife credit for this silhouette picture. I also have to give her credit for introducing me to photography. She's been doing it for a lot longer than I have, and has taught me a lot tips and tricks that I use all the time. It's great to share our love of photography. (Plus, it's a lot easier to justify purchasing expensive equipment!)

This one is probably my favorite that I shot here. This is one of those formations from years and years of erosion. It's also one of my first experiments with HDR (High Dynamic Range). For those of you not familiar with the concept, it's a post-processing principle used by photographers to even out the exposure on high contrast scenes. It's hard to capture a scene the way you would like when it has really dark shadows, and extremely bright areas. You either have to expose for one or the other. Your camera can't do both. You basically take two pictures of the same thing, one exposing for the bright areas, the other exposing for the dark areas, and then blend them together in Photoshop. In this picture, the sunlight on the right wall was quite bright, but the back of the cave was extremely dark. I wasn't happy with the way my exposures were turning out. Generally, I'm not a fan of it. I don't like to take it to the extreme. However, in a case like this, where it just takes a little to make a subtle difference, and you really can't tell, I'll use it. However, I'm not about to take credit for setting the perfect exposure. I'll always admit when I use it.