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Beam of Sunlight
This is a tunnel through a rocky headland at Cavanaugh Beach, just north of Elk. On clear days in winter the sun shines through for about half an hour before setting. When the waves are big, they bunch up going through the tunnel, sometimes reaching the ceiling. After they get through, they spread out and break, but sheets of sea spray stay in the air and catch the light in a most beautiful way. I took this picture kneeling in the wet sand just to the side of the sunbeam.
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Anna’s Hummingbird
In April, in a grove of bishop pines above the mouth of the Big River, I noticed a hummingbird flying from branch to branch and chirping unhappily at me. I walked away and pretended to leave but really hid and watched. After a few minutes it flew to its well hidden nest, made of spider web and lichen and set on a low pine branch near the edge of the cliff. For a sense of scale, the nest was only about one and a half inches across, and the pine cone on the right was about three inches long. The thing that looks like a string is just more lichen that was hanging from a branch up above.
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Bowling Ball Beach at Dusk
The balls of Bowling Ball Beach are large sandstone concretions that weather out from the softer sandstone. I took this picture in the late evening, using a 30 second exposure to get the misty look in the waves. I was standing on some other rocks to take the photo, and when I was ready to leave I realized the the tide had come in behind me and was too deep to walk through. I had to jump from ball to ball like stepping stones, and just before reaching shore I slipped and fell in. I went in thigh deep, but was able to hold my camera up out of the water.
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Dawn Moonset
This spot is about two miles north of Elk, just off Cavanaugh Beach. Early one November morning, when I first arrived, the moon was behind clouds and the dawn light was barely starting. As I watched, a gold looking pool of reflected moon light appeared out on the water and slowly spread toward me. By the time the full moon itself was visible, the first colors of dawn were lighting up the surrounding clouds.
Way out on the the horizon you can see a bank of fog.
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Dewdrops and a Blackberry Thorn
I took this picture one morning in December, about half an hour after sunrise. Exploring around a cow pasture east of Fort Bragg, I saw that each spider web was coated in frost, and as the sun hit, the ice was melting and beading up into tiny drops. Being so perfectly round, these drops made great wide angle lenses; each one shows a tiny inverted image of the blackberry leaves, grassland, redwood trees, and sun in the background. The sun appears as a starburst because I used a very small lens aperture. I liked this strand of web because of the backlit thorn and because it wasn’t blowing around in the breeze like the webs on the smaller stalks.
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Dewdrops on Web
One foggy fall morning near Willits, I noticed these dewdrops suspended on spider web between two yarrow stalks. The droplets were unusually large, and each one acted as a lens on the scene behind. If you look at the picture upside down, you can see a tiny image of the hills in each drop.
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