Yesterday, Carol and I used my day off (which also happened to be MLK Day, though I can’t claim credit for that) to explore the Point Buchon trail in nearby Montana de Oro State Park. The park, which runs for a few miles along the California Coast from just outside Los Osos, features spectacular views of sea cliffs, coves, seabirds, and powerful waves smashing themselves upon the rocks.
The Point Buchon trail, unlike the rest, is only open a few days a week, and that for no more than a couple hundred visitors a day (which is a serious restriction on some popular days of the tourist season). It is a bit wilder than some of the other trails, with occasional sightings of mountain lions, rattlesnakes, hippopotami, and other potentially dangerous creatures. (Okay, not hippopotami. Just checking to make sure you’re awake.) We’ve been eager to check it out.
For me, a trip to Montana de Oro is always sort of an ecstasy-and-agony proposition. The ecstasy speaks for itself: wild nature, gorgeous coastline, and (usually) beautiful weather — what’s not to like?
Except I always take my camera along. And for some reason, the landscape always seems to defeat my best efforts to make decent photographs. Somehow all that natural pulchritude ends up flat and lifeless when I commit it to digital memory.
Yesterday, honestly, it was mostly the same. Last night I was on the point of deleting all my photos in disgust (again) when I noticed that one of them — the one at the top of this article — rather came alive when I cropped it just so.
So I took a second look through the bunch and found a few others that seemed salvageable after a bit of work.
This one, for instance, is far from perfect; that section on the left defies every effort at dehazing through various means, and the background could be better. But the billow of the waves works nicely against the undercut surface of the rock. There’s a lot more that could be done to make marginal improvements on the image, but it would be a saga of diminishing returns.
Here’s another very lightly edited image that sort of works (and sort of doesn’t) in both uncropped and cropped states. In the uncropped version above, the nice stratification and torus shape of the cliff formation stands out against the pretty blue of the sea, while it unfortunately also dwarfs the crashing waves to insignificance. Where’s a genuine tsunami or breaching leviathan when you need one?
On the other hand…
… in the close-up view we get the drama of water slashing the rough cliffside, and that to-die-for transparency and color in the still-curling portion of the wave. But the composition becomes less interesting. Again, with a deal more work — or in the hands of a better editor — each of these pictures could be polished to better effect. But in the end, other and more deserving raw images in my library will reward the effort with greater success.
Meantime, I’ll keep whacking away at Montana de Oro from time to time until the stuff that comes out of the camera looks better.
There are definitely worse ways to spend a day off.
Ronald Crittenden 