Pacific Coast Highway

Patrice and Marion decided to come visit me in LA for a couple weeks and since I had 2 days off of work, I cancelled my original plans and organized a 4 day road trip with them. We drove up Pacific Coast Highway early on a Thursday morning all the way to San Francisco, then stay there for a couple nights, drove early Saturday to Yosemite, stayed in beautiful Fresno that same night, then early again for Sequoia and back to LA. Here is a little story of our PCH drive.

We woke up at around 4:20AM on Thursday to beat traffic and try to hit the nice part of PCH with a nice morning light, we were on the road by 6:00AM. We first had the couple usual stops at Morro Bay and Elephant Seal Beach for a few snaps, nothing too impressive. Then we started getting into the interesting part of the windy road. Mandatory stop at Ragged Point Inn to eat great fish for lunch and walk around the beautiful property and their colorful flower collection.

This was an interesting backlit shot where I was trying to get some details in the flower as well as an aura of light around it. I achieved this by using the camera flash as a fill flash, tweaking the exposure to get what I wanted and burning (darken) and dodging (lighten) in post processing to emphasize the plants in the middle.

Back on the road all the way to Pfeiffer State Park in Big Sur. This is a little park with the gorgeous McWay waterfall crashes right onto the beach. Extremely photogenic place where I need to find a way to come back at sunset and go down for better angles since taking pictures from the trail is pretty limiting. At that point in time, it was pretty overcast and even drizzling.

I had a little bit of fun with HDR as well and since I couldn’t make one shot look good, I decided to test out some limits and was please with the “paint” style rendering I ended up with.

Here is a close up of the waterfall.

Now let’s FART a little see what we can do…

Much more interesting in my opinion even though a lot more could be done!

After our (very) little hike, we got back on the road and stopped at random view points. One of the places we found was filled with colorful plants and was fun to shoot.

Close up of some cool looking plants.

Premium view point for the flowers (besides traffic, though the car in the shot is voluntary).

Now that's a better point of view.

We kept going and made a few last stops before the nicer part of the road ends.

I still have this urge of driving/riding PCH North of San Francisco as I have been told many many times that it is even more impressive than the Big Sur area. But for now, next stop: San Francisco.

Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park

I'm still sorting through all the pictures, I was busy being a host for the past few weeks so didn't have much time to spend on photos. Now I need to catch up on sleep but I am sorting and sorting.
Here's a heavily processed shot that looks cool at least.

McWay Falls in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park

Sequoia (preview)

Not too much happened in Sequoia.
We drove from the North West entrance through Kings Canyon hoping we could go through and exit through the Southern entrance of the park but, with no warning, the road decided to be closed in front of us! Therefore we visited the Grant Grove area in Kings Canyon and drove back to Visalia using route 245. This road is absolutely stunning, I'll definitely be going back to take more pictures!
The only worthy picture I snapped with my iPhone is this panorama of the General Grant tree.
Again, more real pictures to come once I go through the 1,300 that were snapped during this 4 days road trip.
Stay tuned!

Yosemite (preview)

Today was the visit to Yosemite following our great stay in San Francisco (Thanks Eric & Dan). After driving over the golden gate bridge in the early morning, we headed straight to El Capitan's national park, quite an enjoyable ride. We just drove around and visited quickly because of time constraints (work sucks sometimes). For the first time in my few trips out there, we saw wolves! A couple loners were roaming around. Again, I'll post pictures once I get home. Right now it's a well deserved stop in a motel 6 in Beautiful Fresno California. Off to goo Mexican food, then bed early to wake up early for Sequoia!
See you tomorrow LA.

Pacific Coast Highway (preview)

Nice, it's been a while since I didn't drive up that road. Marion and Patrice are here so it's a good excuse to drive up PCH to San Francisco. Always a good drive, even if it rained a little in the middle. Next stops are San Francisco, Yosemite and Sequoia. More pictures coming when I get back.