Took a break from organizing the new office yesterday to visit the coast with Jed and our friend Paul Luscher. Of course we took our cameras – but agreed that even just getting out in the salty, fresh air and hearing the ocean would have been enough if the light wasn’t good. In the end, it wasn’t bad – not a spectacular sunset, but pretty enough, and we worked slow shutter speeds with the rolling waves. Ocean was pretty quiet but there were enough rolling swells to work with, that with 20-30 second exposures, we created the ghosting effect we wanted. Canon 24-105mm, at 50mm, f13 at 15.0 seconds with 3 stop grad (soft edge) for sky.

Salt Point is an unusual park with a high concentration of tafoni formations. Tafoni is an Italian word for cave and the formations are like tiny caves, eroded from sand and wind. The rocks develop a pocked surface, and it’s really cool stuff! See inset photo below. It’s not easy to photograph in color in full sun; the sunlight is what helps to give the formations form and texture, but that produces a higher contrast that is often unacceptable in color. But in black and white, you can work with that contrast to really show the formations.