409 - Malecón de Playa Hermosa
Finally starting to get the hang of Mexico. It's beyond words. Today's shoot was completely at a completely random location known as Malecón de Playa Hermosa.
As you may have known, the past couple days we spent with Haley's parents in Mexico, and we had buckets of fun. They were almost like our training wheels for going into Mexico. ATVing through the desert, camping on the beach, visiting La Bufadora, and SO MUCH delicious food. If you're reading this Linda, thanks again. Truly an awesome time.
We spent most of the day working, catching up on editing from the past couple days. Let's just say it got a little out of hand. I edited to the very limit of our time, to the point where we decided to start looking for a place to shoot about an hour before sunset. Not ideal.
And this is when I learned the most important aspect of Mexico photography... There's no guides on where to shoot. You have to figure it all out yourself.
In the United States, you simply Google "best photography spots in _____" and you'll get a million and one articles pointing out what landscapes look cool, then you pick your favorites. That's not the case in Mexico.
Sure, there's guides on the top things to do in MAJOR cities of Mexico, but even those guides are usually stuffed full with wineries, restaurants, and pink Instagram walls. Again, not ideal.
Upon realizing this, my adrenaline began to kick in. I NEEDED to shoot today, but nothing was showing up. I considered a sunrise shoot, but desperately needed to rest from the past couple days, so that was out of the question.
After about 30 frantic minutes of Googling for places around Ensenda (the town we were in,) I just zoomed into Google Maps. And that's when I discovered Malecón de Playa Hermosa. It looked like a pretty standard beach, but it had these weird canopy tent things.
I'd never seen them on a beach before, only in pictures. And from the Google reviews, there were dozens of them on this beach. Plus the place was only ten minutes away. Alright. I now have a vague plan.
We found some nearby street parking, and ran across a main highway like a gringos in a game of Frogger. We arrived at the beach with about 20 minutes until sunset. Just enough time to check out the place and line up a composition.
It was honestly the perfect scene. The clouds starting kicking in gloriously, and the hut things were everywhere. Not to mention the beach was basically empty, besides a few dudes riding horses.
I messed around with some silhouette shots of the huts, but they looked too basic. I moved on to some succulents as a foreground, but I couldn't make them work either. It was too busy. Then... I found one hut that was completely fucked up.
Basically hanging by a thread. I wanted a shot of it, but I needed people to know what it COULD be if it wasn't broken, so I found two other huts right by it. Here's the shot I got:
“Beach of Spades”
Sony a7rIII + Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8
[ISO 640 ~ 17mm ~ f/8 ~ 1/200s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
God I love that photo. Feels like a dream. I made those huts evenly spaced from each other, and lined up enough sky to complete the shot. Three's a perfect number for powerful shots. The human mind likes the number for some reason.
The only PROBLEM was that my lens wasn't wide enough to get the entire cloud formation in the shot, it was cutting off JUST the top. Not to mention it wasn't perfectly centered.
It annoyed the shit out of me. So I took a shot of just the sky, and basically just moved the sky over in Photoshop a couple inches, and fit the entire formation into frame with a square crop.
Technically it's a sky replacement, but that WAS the sky there... Just a couple inches to the right. Haha oh well. That's another lesson learned today I suppose. Don't be afraid to move your sky over slightly in Photoshop using the same technique as sky replacement.
And that's about it. One and done for this shoot, folks.
The more I think about it, the more excited I am to be shooting in locations that aren't "known." Gives me a lot more flexibility for creativity, and no pressure to get "the shot" of a certain place. I'm excited to develop new research techniques to find locations, more specifically in the Google Maps realm. I have a feeling it's about to become my best friend.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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