Rocks and Surf Patterns, Navarro Head

I was fortunate enough to be able to be in California on the North Coast for about ten days. While there I was able to explore several of the beaches in the immediate area and to experiment with different things. This is one of the happy experiments from that trip. The unpredictability of the Surf makes it very interesting since you cannot predict what exactly might happen in a situation like this. The best you can do is to try to anticipate. When I am working in a place like this, and I am using my large format film camera waiting for the decisive moment is an exercise in futility, since the exposure will be in the seconds and sometimes in minutes of time. I did six different exposures of this scene. This one and one other were what I wanted, the other four were duds. Uninteresting tones of black and white on a piece of paper.

I used a light yellow filter on the lens to cut through some of the haze as well as to show better separation of the bluish tones that are always a part of photographing near the ocean.