Point Mugu

I met another photographer recently who was a student at Brooks in Santa Barbara and has been shooting around the area for a while.

With a favorable "partly cloudy" weather report, we drove 45 minutes down the coast to a spot called Point Mugu for some sunset seascape photography. The sky looked great as we left Santa Barbara, but got progressively worse as we drove farther south :).

The clouds never ended up breaking, but it was still a great time.

Santa Barbara has mostly sandy beaches, and doesn't have this kind of dramatic meeting of jagged rock and violent waves. So just being there and watching the waves crash was awesome.

Getting to shoot with a much more experienced photographer was a lot fun--I pummeled him with questions the whole drive down, and it was interesting to watch someone else work. Probably the best part, though, is getting to compare results and see a different perspective on the scene. Have a look at his image!

Let's shed a little more light...

1/2 sec. at f/8.0 and 200mm

This is the same spider from the last image, taken on the same night. I wasn't sure if my exercise in "ambiguity and delay" was going that well, so I decided to try a more traditional approach in case my experiment didn't pan out.

Both were taken at night, with the only light coming from a street light across the way. For this one, I actually grabbed a halogen work light from the garage and lit him up :)

The best part is that this guy is still out there, in the same spot, almost three weeks later! I've actually discovered the particular leaf that he hides behind during the day, and I've been checking on him periodically. It's supposed to rain a lot this weekend, though, so I'm curious to see if that does him in.

If he's still around, I may tear his web down and try and get a timelapse of him creating a new one. We'll see...