I’m kind of a sucker for California, sunsets and beaches (if you haven’t noticed). So when I can get all three of them in one image, I’m pretty satisfied. I have an almost identical image of this pier that was shot about 10-15 minutes later in an older blog post. That image shows just how quickly sunsets change from beautiful golden warm tones, to surreal and cool tones. I took this image on a photo walk with Trey Ratcliff, back in January. If you like the images on this blog, you should check out his work as well over at Stuck in Customs.

I took this image with a Canon 5D Mark II (I’ve got a review here), and a Canon 24-70mm lens (review here). I kept the aperture fairly low here to freeze the waves as much as possible. The lower your aperture, the faster your shutter speed. Shots like these have several obstacles, including waves, birds in the air, people walking by on crowded beaches, and so on. Some people can’t figure out how you would be able to freeze birds in the air when you’re taking 3-7 frames of a scene. To concur this obstacle, you can either mask in one of the lower light frames (which always have the fastest shutter speeds of the set, or shoot a single RAW image and convert it into a pseudo HDR.