Foggy canyon road through Malibu

Here’s one from my last fog sesh in Malibu. This was well after sunset as the street lights on Malibu Canyon Road came on. The fog was drifting in and out of this section nicely and was thin enough to let the street lights to shine through. Caught the fog creating some crazy patterns in the foreground which I didn’t see until I edited this one.

Nikon D750, Nikkor 70-200, f/8, 5 sec, ISO-250

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Supermoon rise over Los Angeles

The supermoon rising over Los Angeles at around 550mm taken with the Nikon D750 and Nikkor 200-500 lens. Taken from Baldwin Hills.

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Lunar Eclipse over Los Angeles

Did a bit of bushwacking to get a south as possible to get the partial lunar eclipse setting over the heart of the skyline. Should have probably went a tad further south but this location worked out pretty well. This is a single frame at 500mm, and I will probably blend some later and probably put together a sequence of the set but wanted to throw this one out for those who were still in bed. 

Nikon D750, Nikkor 200-500, f/8, ¼ sec, ISO-50

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El Matador beach cave and Milky Way, Malibu CA

Everything is better inside a cave right? The El Matador cave is a bit harder to access than the Leo Carrillo one as tide really has to be low unless you are willing to get swamp feet. Plus its more of a trek down the beach. This one looks out more South facing and is a great line up for the Milky Way on a clear night. This is quite a big cave too and has a few different lookouts you can shoot from but this is the main view. Came here in the dark so had to shoot a separate foreground exposure for the cave to get any sort of details. Blended it with the standard MW exposure to get this final frame.

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Firefall mist, Yosemite National Park

Here’s one from last season before the finale. It’s so cool to witness the progression of the event as the sun sets lower and the beam on El Capitan gets smaller and smaller. Even with the sun still well above the horizon, Horsetail Falls starts putting on a show. A generous flow and some wind can create some magical mist, in this case in the shape of an S. Nikon D750, Nikkor 70-200, f/14, 1/13 sec, ISO-50. Speaking of which, has Yosemite even gotten enough snow for this to happen next month???

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Clouds and Stars over Malibu

Came up here after a beach sesh at El Matador. Wasn’t greeted by any sweet fog comin’ in from the coast but man look at those clouds. I probably got off 2-3 shots before they lost formation. This spot always delivers under any conditions. 

Nikon D750, Nikkor 14-24, f/2.8, 20 sec, ISO-1600

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Palos Verdes cave sunset

Occasionally I will dig though archives to review the sesh for files I missed or skipped over at the time. I shot the PV caves a lot a few years back and got some incredible burns. My blending ability wasn’t as sharp as it is now so I ended up skipping over a lot of files that had major exposure variances in the shadows and highlights that I just couldn’t process how I wanted it to look. Here’s a set of exposures I recently worked on blending them to what you see here. Think I used about 5 files total. One for the cave, one for the water flow, and 3 for the sky. Until cameras can capture a huge exposure range, blending with luminosity masks is still the best way to achieve a natural and realistic blend to compensate for what technology cannot capture.

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