The North Coast     Anchor Bay Day Two

Karen has a friend by her house who has beautiful property. It's up the hill from the sea, with a distant view of the ocean and really cool cabins he rents out. A couple have no heat outside a wood stove, and no water or electricity, but those are only open in the summer. It may get down to freezing this time of year at night and although it did not get quite that cold on the night I stayed, it did get cold enough that I really appreciated the heater in the chicken coop. Yes, a remodeled chicken coop under a garage which was more like a hotel room, well, only a half bath, but running water, a heater and all kinds of amenities like electricity -- even a hot water kettle and tea! I was happy.

I spent the evening working on all the photos I had taken the previous two days for this web site. But as the hour approached midnight, I ended up turning in early. I'm glad I did. The next morning was beautiful. I was unfortunately not in a good position to catch the sunrise, but I did get some shots of narcissuses blooming in the field and some really beautifully photographs using my 80-200mm lens in a redwood grove.

Redwood trees are ancient. Very ancient and they do not typically spread by seed, but by branching off young trees from the roots of a 'mother' tree. In the grove the mother tree had been cut down back in the days this area was used by logging, but all her kids were still here. I got a cool photo of a few of them all lined up, but mostly I focused my eftsoons on closeup shots of the old lichen and moss covered wood of their predecessor. Again, these were very long exposures of anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds! In particular I like the shots of mushrooms growing out of the old decaying redwood. Then the dogs came over and stepped on my mushrooms so I decided to shoot them instead. Well, Maggie anyway. ;-) She posed nicely.

Karen then came around and we headed off to her place to pick up her two boys, Wolfie and Moon. It was high tide at noon so our beach adventures were going to be very brief and very limited. There were also some high waves and wind blowing salt spray. I did not want to get my camera salty so I stayed well back from the water. However, I did manage a few good shots of driftwood, a back lit wave crashing on a rock in the distance and a few of wolfie at the beach -- and under the desk at her office.

We had a wonderful picnic lunch at one of the houses along the water. A friend of Karen's lent us his porch with a million dollar view. And what a view!

I decided once again to forego taking many wide angle photos and once again took out the 300mm and the doubler.

Seagulls, lots and lots of seagulls. They flew by heading north along the shoreline in huge flocks numbering hundreds of birds. Fortunately they did not stop to hover over us or we would have been in trouble with all the food we had...

I focused most of my efforts on photographing the waves. Even though we were a hundred or so feet above the waves, in using such a long lens, it did not look all that bad and in fact I kinda like this perspective of waves coming to shore. There must have been a good sized storm way off in the Pacific for the swells were fairly high, nothing totally spectacular, but nice enough. I sure can't complain. On the contrary, I shot literally hundreds of photos of waves crashing to shore and along the rocks out at sea.

I also captured a cormorant sunning himself. Patience and waiting, and waiting....waiting for him to open his wings as cormorants commonly do. Though he briefly did open his wings to sun himself, I missed the shot. Oh well.

The photo of a seagull with a wave crashing behind, I like. I also like the photos I managed to get with some really good colors in back lit waves as the afternoon progressed. Hundreds and hundreds, literally hundreds of photos of waves. It was hard to pick just a few for this page.

As the sun began to set on the horizon, sinking into distant fog hugging the ocean, I switched back to my 28-70 and took some wide shots of the colors produced on the water through a pine growing right at the edge of the cliff. As the last of the sun disappeared into the clouds, I captured its last few seconds with my 300mm lens.

As the light waned, I continued shooting. Like yesterday afternoon, I used my 28-70 with a polarizer and a small aperture to create 10 second long exposures. The waves crashing over the rocks look more like a thick mist in these photos, a mist which hugged closely to the rocks, but in reality was not mist, but simply the effect of the wave moving through the image as it was exposed. These final magical photos made a fitting end to my travels here in California.