Malibu rays at sunset

One of my fav spots to watch the sun set is up on Piuma ridge in Malibu. When you get any kid of clouds or haze in the sky, once the sun hits it near the mountains it creates awesome light rays cutting through the canyon. I came up here during the sandfire as the smoke was blowing over from Santa Clarita. Didn’t have any fog this day but the smoke added some unique color to the sky. Shooting into the sun is always tricky from dynamic range to lens flare. For flare always just make sure your lens/filters are clean. Sometimes you can move around a bit too to change your angle which can help minimize flare. For dynamic range I don’t use any sort of grad filters so this shot consists of many exposures. I used about 3 for the foreground and another 3 for the sky to bring back the highlights especially near the sun. I chose to go vertical to capture the houses down at the bottom to give this some sort of scale. I did also shoot this in landscape format but will save that edit for another time as it is a bit tedious. One of my dream shots from here is to have fog fill the canyon below as well as high clouds and rays shooting through the mountains. All shots taken with the Nikon D750 and Nikkor 70-200.


www.bay-photography.com