Nature

Serenity Reef

There's something special about the ocean, the waves and sand are constantly eroding away the coast in a perpetual attempt to change the landscape. I could sense this constant change at this reef at my favorite beach in southern California. The sandstone tide pools show wear from the millennia of battering from the waves, but they have created a landscape unlike any other I've seen.

Last Light

This is my second time shooting the same subject. I was lucky enough that both times I came to this spot, the tide was at its lowest just as the sun was setting. The first time I visited, I wasn't able to capture exactly what I felt like capturing because I forgot a piece to my tripod. However, on my most recent trip, I had everything in order, and mother nature was working to my favor as well. With the timing of the tide, clouds, and sun being perfect I had to claim my spot along the tide pools well before the sun approached the horizon. I knew that the clouds might not be optimal, as they were quickly moving away from me as the air began to cool. I was able to take the last glimpses of the sun before it sunk behind the low-hanging clouds in the distance.

Big Sur

Big Sur National Park is one of the most visited National Parks in California, but one of the least photographed. Highway 1, which runs right through the park allows for easy access to the area and for millions to enjoy its beauty every year, but with few places to pull over or hike, it's hard to truly soak it in. I look forward to re-visiting this area in the next month and hopefully capture some more great shots of the best part of California.

Endless

This is, once again, from my favorite location to shoot at in La Jolla. The tide pools along that small section of coast, are so dynamic, it would be impossible to get the same shot twice. I have visited this location many times before, so I tried to stray from the normal sandstone formations I normally shoot, and find a new composition. With the tide higher than normal, I decided to use it to my advantage, and show the waves crashing and interacting with the rock. I made sure to use a long exposure to show the movement of the water and sea foam as they moved through the eroding rock. Wave after wave, I kept taking photos to try to get the perfect look of the water sweeping over the rock. After a half hour in this location and hundreds of photos of the rock formations, I knew I had captured what I needed with this single image. I decided to have this photo in black and white to accentuate the rough texture of the protruding stone, and the silky look of the moving water.

Infinite

It's hard to really understand the vastness of Death Valley without making your own journey through the park yourself. We stayed in the park, but the location I had in mind was still a 4 hour drive from where we were. To get there before sunset, we left before 3pm. Driving 2 hours along a deserted road, where a small dirt road forked off, leading 27 miles into the mountains. That dirt road was one of the roughest experiences of my life. 2 hours straight of rough washboards, loose gravel and hazardous pointed rocks. Being out in the middle of death valley, the hottest place on earth, in the middle of the summer is no small undertaking, so we were extra careful to make sure nothing punctured the tires on the way out. Once we saw this dried lake bed out in the distance, the whole trek out was immediately worth it. It's been a dream of mine to see this these rocks since I was a kid. I had always read about how they move across this lake bed by themselves, leaving trails behind them in the mud, and now I was finally able to see them in person. As we got out of the car, it was a race to find the best rocks before the sun went down. Some rocks didn't have trails behind them, some trails weren't impressive, and some trails were missing rocks. But this rock stuck out to me, it had a 100 yard trail making a distinct "S" in the soil, so when night fell, I set up my camera to capture the rocks like I had never seen before. Because the summer is so unbearably hot, a photo of these rocks during "Milky Way" season is incredibly rare. And without a person around for 20 miles, I was the only one to capture this amazing sight.

Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park, while not immediately noticeable as a beautiful place, it's remoteness makes it one of the best places in California to take photos of the Milkyway. At night the sky lights up and our Galaxy is right in your face. This night I was planning on taking photos of rock feature in a nearby part of the park, but a small light from a campsite several hundred feet away made it impossible to get the photo I needed. So, I headed back towards a particularly large grouping of Joshua Trees, and walked through thick brush at midnight looking for the perfect tree. When I found the tree, I had to wait a little bit longer for the Milkyway to line up perfectly with the tree. It was a long night, but this made it all worth it.

Abandoned Night

My second night in Joshua Tree yielded similar results to my first night. The same rock feature I tried to photograph was still washed with some nearby lights, but I remembered some old ruins I saw hiking in the back country earlier in the day. I drove back out to the dirt road I traveled on earlier, and walked out in the darkness to find the same spot. With no flashlight, it was almost impossible to see this disintegrating windmill against nothing but the Milkyway in the sky. This is a photo that I had been hoping to get for a while, old windmills are far and few between, but a few are still out there and my first photo of one, definitely got me hooked on them.

Lone Galaxy

In early August this year, conditions to view the night sky were better than they have been in over half a decade. The new moon ensured a perfectly dark night, allowing for the stars to shine. The Perseids Meteor Shower was at its peak, with bright pieces of comet dust lighting the sky. And the jewel of the summer sky, the Milky Way, had its core completely viewable with the naked eye. Cameras are amazing at night, they can show you more in the dark than what your eye could ever see. Leaving the sensor exposed to the dull light of the night sky reveals what you're truly missing. With this photo, I attached an ultra wide angle fisheye lens, to capture as much of the night sky I could in one photo. I positioned myself to capture the Milky Way arching above this lone tree in a field high up in the mountains. I left the camera perfectly still for 30 seconds, gathering far more light than the human eye can see. As I viewed this image for the first time that night, I knew that this was instantly one of my favorite photos I made from that night.

Cholla Garden

This photo is by far my most memorable, but not for any obvious reason. There is a patch of these Cholla Cactus in Joshua Tree National Park, it stretches for hundreds of yards in every direction. For these cacti to spread, they actually drop pieces of themselves on the ground, leaving the entire place littered with small spiky cactus balls. When an animal walks by or steps on one, their sharp points stab into their victims and microscopic barbs make it incredibly difficult to remove them from the body. Clearly, it was very easy to make this area become a painful experience, so I treaded lightly and stayed a safe distance from any cactus I saw. With the cactus constantly shedding pieces of themselves on the ground, I was constantly stepping on cactus laying on the ground. My calculated steps between the cactus pieces took back seat when I saw a Horned Lizard near a cactus. I chased it around for a few seconds to try to get a closer look at it, and before I knew it, a sharp pain shot up my right leg. Three large pieces of cactus had ebedded themselves on the lower part of my leg, stabbing deep into my Achilles tendon. Because the spikes are all over the cactus, it was impossible to pull them out by hand, so a small stick was used to pry them out one by one. After pulling out over 50 needles from my leg, I was drained but I was able to take this photo only seconds before the sun went down. While I was incredibly amounts of pain while taking this photo, it did make it more memorable for me. And I did catch the lizard, so it was worth it!

Radial

On a long hike near my home, I was climbing to the peak of a rarely visited foothill. As I pulled myself up the rocky hillside, I noticed this small succulent that made its home in a small crack in a massive granite boulder. I pulled out my camera to get a close up shot of this delicate plant just barely clinging to life on this rock.

Eagle Rock

This is one of the newest locations I've found here in San Diego, and incredibly beautiful. Located near the Pacific Crest Trail in a small cow pasture, this granite feature rises up 20 feet into the form of an eagle. It almost looks like it was carved by human hands because of how accurate of a depiction it creates. This was the first, but certainly not the last time I will take a photo of this spot. In the near future I will make another trip to this rock and get some shots of it during the night.

Sandscape

This was my first stop on a 1,500 mile road trip through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. After a brutal 13hour, 1,000 mile drive from San Antonio to Alamogordo, I finally made it to my destination. White Sands National Monument, stands out like a sore thumb in the desert. As the name would suggest, the sand is pristine white, even more pure than what you'd expect to find at a white sand beach. I arrived at 3 in the morning and waited for the first sign of sunrise over the mountain peaks. When the sun started shining on the dunes, the small ripples in the sand appeared contrasted by the dark blue sky, creating an other-worldly scene. As I ran through the dunes, racing the rising sun, I set my tripod down and saw this scene that would best represent the extraordinary expanse of these sand dunes.

Edge

The early morning light at White Sands National Monument is the best time to capture the best photographs. When the sun is high in the sky, the wind carved ripples in the sand are invisible, but when the sun is low in the sky, the shadows created suddenly create incredible textures on the desert floor. That, coupled with the absolutely pure white color of the sand makes for incredible photos.

Sand Abstract

As the sun set in Death Valley National Park, these textures in the Mesquite Dunes caught my eye. My goal for this photo was perfectly sharp focus across the whole frame. With a high quality lens, and a high resolution camera, every grain of sand is visible in this photograph making an incredibly textured photo

Mesquite Dunes

I've always been fond of minimalist photography, and I feel like I've drifted away from that style over the past year, moving more towards vast landscapes and colorful images. I've been going through my old photos to see if I've missed some great photos because I was distracted by some of the grand images. Images like these are some of my favorite because it's an image that almost nobody else has. Going to iconic locations, like the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park, it's very easy to have your eye focused on the dunes rising over 100' high. I very frequently forget to look down every once in a while to capture other interesting aspects of these places. Tucked far back in the field of dunes, some old cracked mud, probably the bed of a dried up lake, was uncovered by the brutal winds of the desert. I loved the hard texture of the dried mud going right up against the soft flowing patterns of the dune in the back. Going through these old photos reminds me sometimes that there's more to landscape photography than the popular scenes, and colorful images, sometimes some of the most interesting images come from small spots of dried mud

Moonset

During a quick road trip through the American Southwest, I was able to make a quick stop at White Sands National Monument, a small stretch of sand dunes outside of Alamogordo. The pure white Gypsum sand was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The dunes went on for miles, looking like piles of snow in the middle of the desert. It was a unique photographic experience for me because I naively assumed that if you've seen one dune you've seen them all, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Each dune has a unique blend of textured ripples, steep faces and winding curves along the spines of the dunes. This photo was taken just days after last years "Super Moon", so the moon was on my mind as I was out in the desert. As I started to trek up the side of a 60' tall dune, I saw the moon about to set on the western side of the dune field. I knew this was going to be an abstract photo as I pressed the shutter release, and it stands to be one of my favorites from the road trip.

The Racetrack

This is the first of several photos I got from this remote location in Death Valley. The Racetrack Playa is an incredibly remote spot in the valley, from our hotel in the park it was still an 8 hour round trip drive to this dried lake bed, including a bone rattling 54 miles of dirt washboards. When we arrived right at sunset, the last visitors of the day left, leaving me and my girlfriend the only people around for miles. As we walked out onto the lake bed, these rocks stuck out in stark contrast to the completely flat playa. We walked for miles to find the best rocks to photograph, this was one of them. The rocks in this valley are unique to anywhere else in the world.Despite weighing nearly 100 pounds, these "Sailing Rocks" still manage to move, leaving these trails stretching for hundreds of feet behind them.