404 - La Jolla Tide Pools
La JOLLA. God I love saying that word. We went to the Tide Pools of La Jolla today.
We WERE going to go to the Anza-Borrego Desert because we'd just finished up a shoot near Slab City, but it turns out you need a 4x4 vehicle to do basically anything that's cool there. (I'm looking at you Font Point and Pumpkin Patch...) Also there's a famous desert flower bloom out there, but it's only in the Spring.
So we decided to take a rain check (heh... it's a desert...) and booked it straight to the Diego.
Browsing some local sites, I saw Scripps Pier on the radar, but honestly I wasn't in the mood to shoot a pier.
I'd also heard about these strange shapes in La Jolla's tide pools, which seemed interesting. Nicknamed the "Potholes" by locals, it appeared to be pothole shaped. Go figure, eh?
Fuck it. Let's go. I haven't gotten a proper tide pool shot in a looong time.
And I actually had a fairly difficult time...
I'm realizing that I need to come in with a GAME PLAN before I shoot the trigger. Am I going for a long exposure of the water? Or trying to get the sun kiss on the rocks? I ended up with a sun kiss on the rocks, but I really didn't know what to do with the water:
“Pothole City”
Taken on Sony a7rIII + Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8
[ISO 100 ~ 17mm ~ f/14 ~ 1.6s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Obviously, to the naked eye, that's a bomb ass photo. But I'm a goddamn perfectionist. The foreground, in my opinion, is damn near perfect. But the background... Bleh.
Ironically, this was the same problem I had at Thor's Well. Perfect foreground and meh waves.
I'm just not sure how to handle them! I think the magic is under or around .5 seconds. I need to practice more waves.
Either that or I'm just a fucking idiot and this is actually a great photo. Who knows.
Anyway, I think the biggest key to making this photo look good was in the edit. I really had to isolate those warm tones on the rocks, because that was the key shot subject here.
Notice how I vignette the shot heavily, but it still looks tasteful. Also notice how I only vignette the bottom half, not the sky. Sky vignettes = no bueno.
I think the biggest lesson I learned here was that you can't be afraid to isolate distracting elements. It felt wrong to vignette as hard as I did, but ultimately it worked because the edges just took the eye from the colors.
Oh, and one more tip I've been dabbling with recently:
One test I like to do before publishing a photo is what I call "The Wallpaper Test." Put it as the background on your computer for a few days. You'll realize extremely quickly what you like and don't like because it's right up in your face.
I messed around with a few other shots, but that was the meat and potatoes here, so that's all I'm publishing.
And that's about it for this shoot. BYE.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
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