The official line at San Onofre State Beach
Biking at Camp Pendleton
Erinn and I spent a couple days last week camping at San Onofre State Beach and surfing at nearby Surf Beach. The camping, sandwiched between the bluffs and I-5 and an active Amtrak rail, leaves something to be desired, but Surf Beach may be my new favorite place in Southern California. As a novice surfer, there’s really no place better that I’ve found in my limited experience. The beach is a mile or so long with low waves steadily rolling in for most of the day, making it a great place to learn without fear of getting thrashed about.
Aside from 4 trips out into the surf, we also went for an afternoon bike ride on a trail that runs through Camp Pendleton, which begins on the south side of the park and extends for miles down to Oceanside, just north of San Diego. Not really the prettiest scenery there, but it made for a good ride.
We also met up with some friends Erinn knows through work who frequent the beach despite the 1 1/2 hour trek from LA. They do it right though, cruising down in a late-model VW camper complete with a bed and small kitchen. We met up with them on the beach and then joined them at their van, where they treated us to a home cooked meal.
Oh, and despite the beach’s reputation as a nude beach, we saw no sign of it other than numerous signs warning would-be nudists to keep their shorts on.
Nude beach or not, I’m sure we’ll be heading back there soon and often.
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Windsurfing at Huntington Beach
The Exposure section of the July issue of Outside magazine features a double truck photo I took earlier this year at Huntington Beach. On my way home from a meeting with an ad agency in Irvine I decided to swing by the beach to look for photos. It had been raining unusually hard that day all across Southern California and I figured the late afternoon sun that had started peaking through the storm clouds would make for some great images. When I got there the sun only lasted 2 minutes before an approaching set of clouds darkened the sky, ruining the beautiful light that had drawn me there. To my surprise though, as I walked along the beach near the pier, I saw a couple kites dancing around the gloomy skyline to the north. I figured they were only power kites being flown from the beach, but as I approached I saw that there were actually a couple of daring kite surfers taking advantage of the choppy water and high winds that had probably deterred the majority of their brethren. I figured they weren’t going to be out there for long and started jogging up the beach to get a closer shot. My timing was perfect, as they lasted only another minute before packing it in.
I blogged a couple of other photos from this experience just after it happened, but since this one just made it into print I figured I’d share it as well. The Exposure page is an ongoing feature in the magazine that focuses on unique outdoor photography and shares the photographers’ camera settings and a brief interview about the photographers’ experience. This one, besides being a nice stormy weather shot, I think had particular interest to them because of the recent relevance of offshore drilling. I hadn’t put much thought about it when taking the shot, but it’s amazing to see how close to the shore California once allowed wells to be drilled. Apparently, until 2008 there was a ban on new offshore stemming from a 1969 oil spill that leaked 4 million gallons of crude off the Santa Barbara coast. The ban was allowed to lapse after “drill now” pressures in response to skyrocketing gas prices. However, members of California’s congress are now pushing to reinstate it in light of recent events.
Exposure usually only features one photographer, from what I’ve seen, but this month there are four, all related to water. If you turn the page you’ll see a fantastic aerial photo of the Colorado River in Canyonland’s National Park by fellow Aurora Photos contributor and National Geographic regular Peter McBride. Not bad company to be in!
Production still for "First Dream Called Ocean"
Last week I shot production stills for an independent film called “First Dream Called Ocean.” I’m still not quite sure what it was about, but I had a fun time spending two days on set while they filmed in the Watts neighborhood and out around the California Poppy Reserve in the Antelope Valley, which, as you can see, was still blooming. I’ve recently begun shooting stills for small productions. It’s both something I can add to my repertoire and, better yet, something I’m actually interested in, given the film studies degree I earned prior to focusing on photojournalism in grad school. I’m not sure that I personally want to get back into filmmaking, but I do enjoy being around the process and also shooting video, which is good now that multimedia has become so prominent in everything from journalism to commercial work. Though I did find myself wanting to jump behind their camera during the shoot! Perhaps I’ll get back into cinematography at some point, but for now shooting stills and some video is good enough. This film just wrapped up last week and I’m actually heading out the door in two hours to attend the wrap party in Culver City. Should be fun! More pics post-jump.
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California poppy fields; Antelope Valley, Calif.
A couple days ago Erinn and I spent a beautiful, though chilly, evening in and around the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserves. I was there to shoot production stills for a friend’s film project, but will share those photos later. The fields are still in bloom and were incredible. Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in Southern California in the spring. Here are a couple shots of the fields and also one of Erinn in what was probably the greenest wheat (I think?) field I’ve ever seen.
California Poppy Reserves; Antelope Valley, California
A spotlit grunion on Venice Beach
I went out last night to join the Venice Oceanarium‘s Grunion Run Party at the Venice Breakwater. The grunion are apparently abundant in the South Bay and their unique mating ritual brings them up on the beach during full moons on spring and summer nights, allowing them to be easily observed and even picked up. They’re supposed to be good to eat too, though most see it as more trouble than it’s worth to scale so many of them for such little meat. I went out at 11 p.m., when the party was starting and after 20 minutes they started popping up on shore one or two at a time. There they flopped about as they did their thing before being washed back to sea by the next big wave. It was a fun thing to see and the sizable crowd that turned out was very entertained. More can be learned about grunions and the specifics of their spawning practices here.
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- Eureka Sand Dunes, Death Valley, Calif.
I have lots of new photos to post, but most are from magazines assignments and haven’t been published yet. So, in an effort to avoid stagnation I went back through my Death Valley photos and picked out a few new ones to post. More info about this trip can be seen 3 posts back, so I won’t repeat it here. More new work coming soon! Continue reading »
I recently spent a great couple of days camping and hiking with Erinn and my friend Matt in Death Valley National Park. I don’t think it rose above the low 80s during our visit, which was perfect for long days of exploring. It won’t be long before the summer temperatures start moving toward 120 degrees, at which point I would not want to be there! We did all of the usual stuff while there, getting up early for sunrise at the Eureka Sand Dunes on the first morning and Zabriskie Point on the second. We spent a couple of hours hunting for a 110-foot waterfall that we found out the next day had long ago dried up (not sure if the park ranger who sent us out there was messing with us or just didn’t know?), visited the salt flats at the Badwater Basin, and brought plenty of great food to grill up once the sun had set. One unusual aspect of our visit was that the park has had more rain in the first 3 months of the year than it normally receives in a year, which left pools of water over the normally parched salt flats. It was pretty and also interesting to see the salt crystals taking form in the water. The last photo in this entry is indeed a scorpion, which I spotted underneath Matt’s tent as we were packing up on the final morning. We did not, however, eat the scorpion, as the photo might imply. Just a way to examine it before tossing it back into the brush. Until this moment, we hadn’t seen any significant wildlife during our 48+ hour visit. It was a funny parallel to our previous visit to Joshua Tree N.P., where we also didn’t see anything until a rattlesnake crossed our paths on our very last hike before heading home.
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I’ve been bad at posting lately, but do have some new work that I’ll be able to share in the coming weeks. Things have been fairly busy, with a couple magazine assignments for London’s Financial Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, a few fashion portfolio shoots and a wedding this coming Saturday. Hopefully after that I’ll be able to share more. Now that I think of it, it’s not going to get any slower after that, as I’ll be in Vegas for the WPPI trade show on Tuesday and hopefully back there again a week or so later for another SoCal Scene fashion shoot. Other than a quick detour I took while driving west on my move to L.A., I’ve never been to Vegas before! So I’m definitely looking forward to it. Hopefully sometime in there I’ll manage to put up some new posts In the meantime, these are a couple I took last week while scouting locations for other shoots. The top is a surprisingly noisy hummingbird I came across in Venice and the bottom is Erinn strolling through El Escorpion Park in Canoga Park, where I have a shoot this Sunday.
Just some more stormy weather photos taken on Venice Beach over the past week. I was hoping to find someone out there surfing, but the surf was too rough. I don’t know what it’s called, but the shot of the crashing wave after the jump is something that happens when a wave coming in from the ocean collides with a wave that’s coming back out to sea from the coast. I think it’s caused by a steep incline near the shore that forces the water back out. On a smaller scale I found myself in that spot in El Porto, a beach a couple miles south, while surfing a couple weeks back and was pretty close to getting hit in the head by my own board by the force of it. On the scale seen in this photo I’m not surprised no one was out in the water! The fire spinner is Ricky Otterstrom, who was out practicing atop one of the winter dunes on the beach. A few days ago I complained on Facebook about getting sand in everything. This was when that occurred. Despite the wet sand from days of rain the wind was strong enough to dry off the top layer and send it whipping across the dunes. I shot him for a couple minutes until I couldn’t take the beating anymore and called it quits.
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After a meeting with an agency in Irvine today I decided to drive up the coast from Newport Beach to Long Beach just to explore. When I got to Huntington Beach there was a gorgeous light coming from behind an approaching storm cloud that forced me out of my car just south of the Huntington Beach Pier. Just north of the pier I spotted some kites and figured they were just power-kiters out on the beach, but then I saw one pop up in the air and realized there were actually people out kite surfing, despite, or more likely because of the large choppy waves being produced by the stormy weather. I hustled over their way and despite their moving quickly away from me I was able to catch up enough to get off a couple shots just before they packed it in as the black storm cloud got too close for comfort. I’d hoped to get one of them popping out of the water or a close-up of them battling the waves, but was still happy with what I got. I then spent a few minutes with John Moynihan, 24, as he packed up his gear and walked his kite back to the car. A self-described ‘gypsy sailor,’ Moynihan lives on a sailboat that currently resides in nearby Newport Beach. After this I parted ways with him. And just in time, as the rain started to come down and I was a quarter mile away from my car. I packed up my gear and headed back. We’ve had an unusual week here with daily storms and even a few tornados touching down. There was even one in Seal Beach today, which I drove through after shooting this, but I didn’t see anything. I’ve got a couple more stormy weather photos I’ll put up tomorrow or the next day.
