I've been a big fan of Malibu since moving to Southern California in 2013. I've had the pleasure of driving up the Pacific Coast Highway a few times and visit a few of the great beaches that Malibu has to offer. More often than not, I'll venture out to El Matador where someone is inevitably filming, shooting models or just plain soaking it in (no pun intended).
I finally ventured outside of my comfort zone and decided to visit Leo Carrillo State Beach. It is a quiet little gem. I captured a few shots, but this one in particular, ended up being my favorite:
It happens so often that I'll shoot something and in post processing the RAW feels like a throw-away. "Nothing to see here." But God, intuition, whatever you'd like to call it (I call it God) has me sit in front of the image just a little bit longer, and when I start to play...I start to see it. This one might as well have been an HDR project with the work put in on the sky, water, and sand respectively, but I'm saying too much. Hopefully you enjoy the final product as much as I do.
Updated - August 2017
Surprises happen all the time; some good, some not so good. This was a good surprise.
I photographed Leo Carrillo State Beach in January of 2016 and remembered taking a lot of images that afternoon. Somewhere in the process of saving the files, I must have saved them to the wrong folder on my hard drive, or I simply forgot the folder where they were located. I thought the photographs were lost. I must have edited the image above directly from the memory card and then just forgot where I saved the rest.
No matter, the punchline to the story is that the other day (8.7.17), more than a year and half later, I found the folder and the images. The images were tucked into a "randoms" folder in the year 2015 folder. All wrong. But there they were, unedited. It was like an unopened Christmas gift. I'm happy to share them with you now.
While scrolling and playing with the images, a few of them felt really great in black and white, a nice departure from my usual vibrant saturation. Another geeky note, these images were taken in the late afternoon, very near and post sunset. I shot on a Nikon D90 at ISO 3200 and all the noise left the images feeling like they were shot on film and I loved that. Here's to finding hidden treasures, on your computer and at the beach:
