Santa Cruz and Pigeon Point Lighthouse

Last saturday I headed to Santa Cruz with a meetup group to photograph the Natural Bridges, monarch butterflies, UC Santa Cruz arboretum and Pigeon Point Lighthouse. It was an ambitious day that started out overcast and ended up with a no-show sunset.

I headed out to the field armed with my tripod, my 55-200 mm zoom, my 18-55 kit lens, the 35 mm prime, and a remote trigger.

It was about 9:30 a.m. when we arrived at the Natural Bridges State Park. While waiting on the group, I walked to the beach and took a photo of the natural bridges. I must say that I was not very sure about what to do since it was overcast (low light situation), and I did not know whether I wanted to blur the water and or to freeze the motion of the birds. I think I opted to freeze the birds, since blurring the water would mean also getting the birds out of focus.  

I took the photo below on a tripod and using the remote shutter release, in aperture priority. Post-processing was minimal, but it involved considerable cropping and also setting the white balance to “flash” during raw processing, since it seems to best reproduce the colors that I was seeing. However minimal, this processing brought up the contrast and the light much better than my camera's jpeg compression. See below a comparison between the camera's jpeg (above) and the picture processed from raw in Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 (below).

Nikon D3100

35 mm f/1.8G, ISO 400, f/10, 1/320

After the entire group gathered together, we headed out to the Monarch Butterfly trail. The park's Monarch Grove provides a temporary home for up to 100,000 Monarchs from late fall into winter. The monarchs were there, but they were flocking high above in the branches, a minimum of five feet up above us. Only those with terrific zoom lenses were able to get a good shot of them, my 55-200 mm zoom had absolutely no chance. Since I knew my limits, I walked around a little and found a few other things that were interesting, for example this tree root growing on pure rock. There is always something impressive out there in nature, if you only look.

Nikon D3100

35 mm f/1.8G, ISO 200, f/20, 1/4

It must have been 11 a.m. when we headed to the UC Santra Cruz's arboretum. The sun was up. There were only a few plants flowering, particularly in the Australian garden (it is spring now in the Southern Hemisphere). Since I know what my 55-200 mm zoom lens is able to get good shots of flowers when there is plenty of sunlight, and as long as it is sitting on a tripod, I gave it a chance. The photo below is one of my favorites, the flower of Banksia sp., a Proteceae from Western Australia.

Nikon D3100

55.0-200.0 mm f/4.0-5.6 at 122 mm, ISO 180, f/4.8, 1/25

 We then followed to the Pigeon Point Lighthouse between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. There the wind was blowing very hard and the sun was on its way out in the horizon, it must have been about 6:30 p.m. when we arrived. I had to change my lens to the 18-55 mm to get the lighthouse since we were sort of close to it.

The photo below is what I call a Photoshop madness. I really did not get a very good photo of the lighthouse. The sunset was a no-show, my tripod was not sturdy enough for the wind, I did not get my settings right and I failed to walk the distance to get a photo from farther away. After that, we were ready to hit traffic to San Francisco and then back to the Central Valley.