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Vacation: Big Sur, 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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The photos on this page, despite the page title, were not taken in Big Sur, but north of there, along the same stretch of coast (the one with the Pacific Ocean). The scenery is just as beautiful, and cliffs just as rugged, but it's not technically within the bounds of Big Sur. I'm calling it that anyway, since it's coast, it's north/central California, and it's beautiful. As you're about to find out. What's this area like? The ocean is very cold and very deep, even just off shore, and there are virtually no beaches, other than a few at the bases of cliffs that probably flood at high tide, and are hardly large enough to spread a beach towel on. The entire coast is cliffs and rocks, and there is very little rain other than fog and condensation from the sea, which means the vegetation is typical low-rain California plants: chaparral, wild flowers, and weeds. No palm trees, no creeping vines, and nothing like you'd see on ocean cliffs somewhere equally beautiful, like Hawaii. It's also cool most of the year, and cold in the winter, with a very strong wind off the ocean. Lovely to visit now, but if your boat washed up there two hundred years ago and you didn't have any food, you'd better be able to fish, shoot birds, and find shelter, or you would starve in short order, assuming you didn't die of thirst or exposure to the elements first. Most of the photos on this page were taken with my new (as of June 2004) Olympus C-755. There are also some photos from my old camera, a Toshiba PDR-M25, presented mostly for the sake of comparison. You can read more about the differences between these cameras in the camera comparison section of the photos index page.
Before we get to the gorgeous shots, here's one of me, taken by Malaya. This shot was taken with the old camera, obviously enough, since I've got the new one in my hands and around my neck. The weather was gorgeous, and the wind was tremendous all day, as the back of my shirt demonstrates.
Looks like a perfect postcard view of some truly gorgeous scenery, eh? The funny part is that it all looks like this; I got out of the car on a turn out, pointed, and clicked. You literally can not take a bad photo in this area, as this page shows. Click this for a much larger view.
This is about the only shot on this page that was taken with the new camera, and is not a thumbnail linking to a far larger shot. It's the water in this one that really makes it work for me; so blue/green and turbulent. The rocks are gorgeous too, though. Makes you want to dive in, doesn't it? Better get a running start; the water is at least 70 feet below the cliff top, and there's quite a bit of rocky beach to clear. The upper shot was taken with the new camera, the lower one with the old one. The difference in light quality and detail should be pretty obvious at a glance. I didn't darken the old camera shot, it's just darker like that. Also, it can't be fixed by increasing the brightness of the shot, since the foam is already brilliant white. Turning it up more would make the cliffs lighter, but the parts that are already light would become overexposed and blur together in a white smear. Besides, isn't the whole point of having a good camera so you don't have to go back over your every photo with Photoshop to make it look good?
Here's another side by side example of photos from the old camera (on the left) and the new one (on the right). As I describe in the camera comparison, the old shot doesn't look bad... until you view the new one. It's far crisper, showing every rock in detail, letting you see the individual grasses, the glimmer on the water, etc. Click each photo to see them full size, and the difference is overwhelming.
This was more of a wave splash pool than a tide pool, but I thought it was pretty anyway. Click it to see the full-sized shot and get an idea of how large and far away it is.
I love the way the water washes over rocks, most of which were probably part of the cliffs, tens of thousands of years ago. The sea is gradually wearing them all down to nothing, of course. Click this for a much larger view.
This shot aims just a big higher than the one below it. You could probably stitch together the two shots, if you had some time to burn.
These were taken next to a large valley, where the highway stretched over an impressive bridge. Just before each end of the bridge, you can see an old dirt road stretching off into the hills, beetling along the side of steep hills as it runs off into the distance, out of sight around the twisting canyon. I'd imagine coast commutes became a lot more tolerable after the bridge was built as part of the great public works projects of the 1930s. Click the image for a much larger view.
And here's the bridge, with my dad in the foreground and me down to the right, taking the photos you see above this one. What you can't see in the picture is the wind; it was howling up from the sea. Opening a car door into the wind was difficult, hats had to be removed to keep them from flying away, and I felt safe standing on even the very edge of this 80+ foot drop, since it was almost like the wind would have blown me back if I'd slipped. On the other hand, it did make holding the camera steady a bit of a challenge, especially on zoom shots.
Another long shot of the "you can't go wrong" style. Point at the gorgeous scenery, take the photo, and your job is done. Click it to see the full size shot, with much more ocean and cliffs visible.
One of the other great features of the new camera is an amazingly high quality zoom lens. This rock is the same one you see just off the point of land in the previous shot, courtesy of about 10x zoom. Click it to see the full size or click this link to see it even larger, and in a close up shot that's my favorite one of this whole batch. It makes for a great desktop too.
This shot gives you an idea of how far down it is to the things below. Things that are featured in the next few close up shots. Click this for a much larger view.
Here I've panned to the right a bit from the one above. You can see more of the headland and trails here, and the next shots are focused in more on the pie wedge rock to the far left. I so wanted to scurry down the trail that you see on the headland to the right, but dad and Malaya weren't up for much hiking, and we didn't have time for it anyway. Next time, I hope. Click this shot for a much larger view.
A close up of the low rocks to the right of the pie wedge. I can't say why, but I would get such pleasure from standing or sitting on this little spit of rock and watching/listening to the sea pound against it, from all sides. Click this for a much larger view.
And here's the side of that pie wedge of rock. I love how it's broken off near the shore, leaving this deep channel between rock and land, and I can't help wondering how it happened. Did the sea eat away at this spot after it washed around the cove and hollow out a tunnel which grew larger and larger until it collapsed? Why isn't the space between the bluff and the pie wedge a wading pool of broken rocks? Where did all the stone go when it broke and fell? Is the current through that opening strong enough to wash it away? Click this shot for a much larger view.
One of the brighter shots the old camera managed, and it's a pity it's not really in focus, since the house perched right on top of the cliffs had a private driveway, a stairway down to the rocks, a flat grassy yard, and basically looked like paradise, to me. You can see the old camera's weaknesses here as well; the shot is bright, but all of the foam looks overexposed, and the depth of focus just isn't there.
One of the new camera's least-impressive photos of the day, but the scene was interesting. This little cove was about 10 feet from a parking lot in a public park in Monterey, and that point out there is probably the closest viewing spot to an actual ocean surfing location on earth. Every swell that came in was funneled into the this channel, and the curve of the rocks produced a nicely surfable 3 or 4 foot wave, without fail. There were about a dozen guys sitting out by that point, taking turns on the bigger but shorter-lived waves, while several others kept busy bottom-feeding on the lesser waves that broke past the point, in the safety of this little harbor. This shot actually makes them look further away than they were; you could easily have thrown a rock and pegged a guy right off of his board. If you had good aim, at least.
A last couple of shots of me in photographic action on the rocks at a beach in Monterey. I'm taking that surfing guy photo you see above. The rocks were fun to scramble around on too; dry and large enough to provide easy footing, despite the crazy angles they were piled up in. The big rock behind me in the left shot can be seen to the right of the shot above these two; demonstrating how close to shore this really is.
Here's one last shot of dad and me, taken by Malaya, while I take a picture back at her. This shows off the essential weaknesses of the old camera; we're in focus, but the background is not. Additionally, the sea foam is so bright in the sun that the camera sets that as the baseline for brightness in the shot, which turns the shadowed rock to the left of me into a big black blob, and makes our faces vanish into shadowy darkness.
Other camera shots:
I loved the scenery and weather, and really wanted to climb down some of the goat-steep paths to walk near the water. And when we return to this stretch of coast, as part of a drive down the entire coastline, I hope to do so. I'll probably need about two more 256MB camera chips though, as many photos as I'm likely to take. Any shots from a future visit will go on a new Big Sur trip page though, so no point in checking back to this one for potential updates. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
