black & white study 0488

22 Jul 2013•Black & White, Places, Travel

The pier at Venice Beach allows you to walk safely out to the point where the waves break.

I drove down to Santa Monica to meet some friends and we decided to head over to Venice Beach and walk around a bit.

One of the nice things about this beach is the Pier that extends out into the break of the waves. There may be others, but this is the only one I’ve seen so far where the pier extends out this far. This allowed me to get this perspective that I would not have been able to get otherwise.

The conversion to black and white was done entirely in Photoshop Lightroom 5 with the aid of Kubota the Blacksmith preset available from Kubota Image Tools.

Malibu 309

19 Jul 2013•Black & White, Places, Travel

El Matador Beach. Malibu, CA

Ventura Pier 346

18 Jul 2013•Black & White, Places, Travel

Ventura Pier

I ran down to Ventura after work to photograph the Ventura Pier before sunset. The light was very nice this evening and I took the opportunity to continue practicing shooting long exposures using my Lee Filter Big Stopper 10-stop ND filter.

I thought this one looked best in black and white (processed with Google/Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2) but I have another version that is color that I’ll post soon.

Malibu 334

18 Jul 2013•Places, Travel

A long exposure photo looking down on El Matador beach in Malibu.

It’s kinda of funny. I spent a good hour walking around down on the beach trying to get long exposure photos of the water washing around the big rocks that make up El Matador Beach in Malibu, but this shot is one of my favorites from the day.

On my walk down the big stairway to the beach, I thought there might be something to this view, but I kept on walking down to the beach. On the way back to my car though, I stopped and took another look and decided that this might be the view I was really after.

So I unpacked my gear and set up for this shot. I’m glad I did.