The second week during our trip to Santa Cruz, we decided to take a road trip south to Monterey. Having heard about the aquarium and the views on Highway 1, I was quite exited. The aquarium was very nice, but also quite crowded. Also, some of my traveling companions weren't as interested as I was, so I had to hurry through some of the exhibits.
Taking pictures in an aquarium is quite difficult. Since you can't use a flash, you sometimes need to pump the ISO to ridiculous levels. I had guessed as much, so I also came prepared with one of my primes, the Nikon 35mm f1.8 DX. The bigger the aperture, the more light you get; a prime is quite essential in this type of a situation. Also, this is one of the few situations where the more expensive full frame cameras produce better quality pictures than your average point-and-shoot or entry-level DSLRs.
Lighted exhibit; I like the silhouettes as you immediately understand what you are looking at. Also, the colors were great.
Feeding time at the biggest tank. Lots of fish, lots of spectators. I had to use ISO 3200 and f1.8 to get the shutter speed to 1/200s; any less, and the fast-moving fish would have been a complete blur. The grain is really noticeable already; a full-frame camera would have been great :)
The manta liked being touched; it felt like wet, spongy silk :) Since I don't like people, I would have preferred to only photograph the animals. I have a lot of those photos, but it's really difficult to get a clear, good picture of a captive animal. Pictures like the above tell a better story in the end.
Don't forget the small exhibits. By getting in close, you can sometimes remove the effects of the glass which typically ruins your shot.
After the aquarium, we continued south along Highway 1, through Carmen-by-the-Sea, and all the way to Big Sur. The coastline is absolutely fantastic, I wish I could have stayed for days. Alas, we had to get back to Santa Cruz in the evening, so I had to do with a few quick pit stops by the side of the road. Next time, I'll definitely stay for sunset.
Coastline in Carmen-by-the-Sea
Somewhere along Highway 1, south of Monterey
Rocky Creek Bridge.
A couple of days later, inspired by the night photograph I had taken the week before, I tried getting a shot of the Milky Way. How hard can it be, right? Turns out, this is again of the the places where gear does matter. Also, location, location, location. Ideally you'd be somewhere with zero light pollution, that has interesting ground features, with a superwide prime and a full-frame. As you saw in the previous post, Santa Cruz does have light pollution. Also, since this was my first time, I didn't really understand the 'interesting ground features'. I was really surprised on how big the Milky Way is, too. I used my 15mm equivalent wide angle, and there was no way I could capture the whole thing. The aperture on my lens was also holding me back. Ideally you'd have a prime, with an aperture of f2.8 or bigger; I only had f3.5 and f4 if I wanted something sharp. In the end, I had to crank the ISO to 3200, producing lots of noise.
My first attempt at the Milky Way. next time, I'll be out in a natural park (or at least the archipelago). Also, I have lots to learn about processing the night sky so that it looks nice..
During the week, most of us wen't out to a beach of some kind; being mostly nerds, you can imagine how that looked :) Personally, I'm not one for lying on the sand. Instead, I took my long lens, and hunted for some local wildlife. The first on I found was a huge heron of some sort. Since we don't have many of those in Finland, I have no idea about the actual species. It was huge (over a meter tall), and let me come surprisingly close while drying itself by the beach.
Heron at Four Mile Beach. While I did get close, it never took it's eyes of me. Considering I looked like an albino paparazzi, I wouldn't have, either.
The second variant of the local wildlife was some surfers. I settled in on the beach, waiting for the surfers to do something else than float. Again, you want to capture the peak of the action. You can do it however you want, but I just burst through a hundred or so images, this one among them. The colors were quite bad because of all the haze that was coming in, so I decided to go black-and-white.
Surfer at Four Mile Beach.
The last weekend, I decided to do something special. I gathered a couple of colleagues, and got one of us to drive the lot up to the Big Basin State Park headquarters, north-west of Santa Cruz. We were going to do the third part of the Skyline to the Sea trail; walking from the mountains down to the beach, about 25 kilometers. We started with walking around the Big Basin park HQ, as there is a short trail with some of the biggest Redwoods in the area. And yes, they are huge.
Yup, big trees. Really big trees.
Looking up didn't really work; you loose all perspective on what is tall and what isn't. Still, you couldn't help but look.
Sometimes, the shot isn't where you typically look.
The trail is a small path through the forest; proper walking shoes are definitely recommended, as is plenty of water. I was also stupid (smart?) enough to bring all of my camera gear. It proved quite useful, at least once we took a short detour to look at the Berry Creek Falls. As this was October, there was almost no water in the streams. I still took pictures, using my polarizer and 8-stop ND filter, and I think they ended up rather nice.
Berry Creek Falls, hiding among the forest. This one is hanging on my wall, it looks great when printed big.
Another part of the falls.
Berry Creek.
I really enjoyed the first half of the walk. At that point, the terrain changes; you no longer walk in the forest, along huge trees and lots of green. The path becomes a road, and the trees become less and less green when you get closer to the ocean. Everyone in our group agreed; it would have been more fun to walk back to where we started from the half-way point. There was a highlight, though, when we saw some deer walking in the forest next to us. They didn't stick around for me to change lens and take a shot, unfortunately :)
We arrived at Waddell beach, a bit tired and with very, very tired shoulders. I shook of my backpack and took the last image of the trip.
Sun setting over Waddell Beach.
All in all, quite a nice trip. Seeing Redwoods is something I can now cross off my bucket list. I have a few regrets, though; spending more time on Highway 1 is the first. I know there are amazing opportunities for landscape shots during sunset, but I didn't take them. The second one is to get pictures of raptors; I saw big soaring eagles and smaller, darting hawks every time we went on a trip somewhere, but I didn't manage to get a single picture of them. I'm planning to rectify that with a trip out to my cottage to shoot some eagles on the ice later this winter, though. We'll see if I find any :)
That's it for this trip, though. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. Next up, shooting small flying critters earlier last year, as I play around with macro photography.