This morning, I came back from my third trip to California this year (it helps to have your long-distance girlfriend live there for sure). The purpose of this trip was primarily for my birthday. I was able to get a week's long PTO from work and I planned to go to Yosemite for a few days of the week (This will be its own post later, once I have my photos in order). In the downtime before the trip to Yosemite, Neeraja and I managed to pull off some short expeditions to nearby areas on the Pacific coast in California, and thus, I did some Bay Area Photography.
Monterey
Earlier in the trip, we decided to drive to Carmel, a town on the Pacific bay. For whatever reason, our Google Maps avoided highways and a trip of 45 minutes turned into a longer backroads drive of an hour-and-half. I like such drives, so I didn't have much to complain about. We stopped by a small town named Soquel on the way, which had a cute cafe and a bunch of antique stores. Here, I found a church that instantly caught my eye. Bathing in the afternoon light, it looked like a painting. I stopped midway on a street to take this photo.
I think it's the colors and overall lighting that remind me of Grant Wood's American Gothic, eventhough this isn't Gothic at all. I wish I could remove the cars parked on the side. Maybe 40 years later, the cars will be considered vintage.
This town had 5 antique stores on the same street. You bet I looked in every single one of them, hoping to find the ever-elusive $5 Leica. We spent an hour and a half just roaming in this town and checked out a local cafe, called the Ugly Mug CoffeeHouse. Then we decided to end this detour and head towards Carmel. But before that, I took another photo of the church.
Later that day, we ended up at a rather touristy spot near Bixby Bridge. I did not feel inspired to take pictures here. Perhaps I would've felt better had I made it to the Monterey Car Show I found out about quite recently. It was only later at Hurricane Point that my creativity started to move.
I like how the background and the horizon fade out in this photo. I also like how you can see Bixby Bridge on the right.
As the sun started to set, I decided to move back north, as I wanted to see some rocks and I finally had an idea of what I wanted to shoot.
We made it to Garrapata Vista Point, and I took some photos on my film camera and this photo after sunset on digital. I like the two people standing on the rocks in the middle of the frame.
Sausalito
The next day, we decided to visit Sausalito. Since I'd gone to San Francisco just three weeks prior to that in my previous trip to the Bay, Sausalito would be a nice change of pace. We took the ferry from the San Francisco pier.
Sausalito is gorgeous, with gorgeous cars. There, I saw many Porsches, an Aston Martin DB12, and even a Jaguar E-Type!
Still, I didn't feel like I was cooking. But that wasn't the point of coming here, the point was to enjoy and walk around the pretty neighborhood and try Napa Valley Burgers (Their vegetarian option rocks)
On the ferry back to San Francisco, I think I finally felt inspired. Nothing gets me going like a bit of pre-sunset golden-hour light and the ocean.
The Golden Gate Bridge bathed in golden-hour light, and the most telephoto lens I had was a manual focus Vivitar 200mm. I tried to focus on a boat I saw perfectly placed in my view.
This is probably one of my best photos. I'm printing this. I've been watching a lot of street photography videos and one of my new favorite composition techniques is using diagonals, and this shot fits it pretty well.
There's also a nice case of zone layering, with the hills and the bridge colors fading away in the background, yet being present and distinguishable.
The ferry also reminded me of last year when I took the ferry in New York City to the Statue of Liberty and back.
I took a few more photos before sitting down and enjoying the ride back.
When we reached the San Francisco pier, we slowly made our way back to the car, while I went trigger-happy riding the high from the photo taken earlier.
I think these photos are just okay.
So that was that. The next day, we would drive 4.5 hours to Yosemite National Park, and that had its own set of images that are in the works right now. More to come! Leave a comment if you liked it and subscribe to my blog for more!
Post-post-post: The last couple of weeks has left me with SO MANY photos. I'm so excited to share them all as I go. There is a whole roll of film that still needs developing, I'm thinking of giving that its own post, perhaps bringing back the "Birthday Films" series. Yosemite is another post entirely. I'm also working on a post that will help film photographers shoot the medium for cheaper! It feels good to be back!
Have any ideas for me to write about? Please let me know!
Stay tuned! :)
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