Shooting Beauty: Big Sur's foggy sunset, incoming tide 2

Thanks! It was fun to capture it because there were professional photographers all over this beach doing the same thing I was: shooting beauty. :-)

I get this feeling, Trudi, you’ll be sitting there one evening and basking in the sweet saltwater air, the evening breeze, and the setting sun. The place just beckons people like you! :-)

If you get there during those special few days (and there are less than 10 of them each year), I’d LOVE to be there and capturing one of the most incredibly wild pieces of beauty you’ve ever seen in a seascape: the setting sunlight exploding through a rock tunnel and leaving rays of purely exquisite beauty in the air and on the water below. That shot is worth my weight in gold and one day, I’ll get it!

Hmmm….....

Cool! Well, I’m glad you get it out of the San Francisco city limits. Hehehehehehe!!!!! (I bet you and I are in the minority of those who can even GUESS what I’m referring to) :-D

True that. LMAO!!!!

Hehehe!

I can kick you some royalties but you’d better get busy and buy something to earn them. LMFAO!

And actually, your suggestion could be better served as an addendum to a set of photographs, linking them together with that common piece of the title.

Not bad for someone who says a snake is “slightly” cross-eyed. :-D That sucker would see two of me and aim for my bald head TWICE! I hope you’re ready to suck the poison out of my nubby scalp. ROTFLMFAO!

If you only knew. The location would drop your jaw and take your breath away at the same time. :-O

I completely agree and I’ll be back there no matter what!

Well, almost the end. ;-) There’s only one catch: the park officially closes at sunset and there’s a locking gate a LONG way from where you’d be and not visible from there either. The locals say the rangers know there will always be someone there until the sunset finishes completely so they let them get out before closing the gate. But if you stayed until the gate was locked, you’d be spending the night on the cool inviting sand, under either a star-studded sky or coastal fog, and there wouldn’t be anyone around for a good distance. Hmmmm. That’s bad???

I agree completely!

Hey Sam, what portraits? I can’t tell which ones you mean. :-/

I can’t remember what camera you’re using so here’s a rather rough explanation of maybe why you had a hard time with your shots.

Grainy shots in low light are probably because of a raised ISO, something a ‘point-and-shoot’ will do automatically unless set for low light. It can happen in DSLR or SLR cameras for the same reason but you have some options for avoiding high ISO there. You can set the ISO for under 300 – 500 and try working with a larger aperture (opening of the lens) and a slower shutter speed. The slower the shutter speed the more of the light that’s there gets in. Some cameras also have a control for tweaking things a little lighter or darker. Working with all three of those options will get you the best results possible but may still not work with no graininess at all.

Using Gimp, you can do a little bit to clean up a grainy shot but graininess is literally impossible to correct if it’s extensive because it’s pixels that were confused and ‘guessed badly’. Masking it (using blurs & filters) or using it for making the shot an abstract is about the best you can do if it’s un-fixable.

Got a laptop to take with you to shoots? Got a camera with a good sized display for reviewing your shots as you take them? Or got lots of available memory? If the first two are good, look at the shot as soon as you take the first one and see if you need to make adjustments. But you can always do what I do: have 8GB of memory available for ALL shoots and take shots with every setting imaginable. Something HAS to work well enough for you to be happier with it than not.

Thank you!

Thank you much!

Thanks! :-)

Thank you! It was the best beach I’d ever seen. :-)