(This is blogged a bit out of order as the things on this post actually happened before the race that I blogged about on Friday. Additionally this is being autoposted for me, written while I was still in California. If you’re reading this on the day it’s posted, I’m in Florida training for the Walt Disney World Marathon (to be blogged later).
When I first got the Meetup Invitation to be at Ocean Beach (at the Sloat parking lot of the San Francisco Zoo), I chuckled to myself and wondered how anyone would get up that early considering it was planned for New Year’s Eve. As time passed I realized that even though I had the New Year’s Resolution run scheduled just a few hours later I could, if I went to bed very early on New Year’s Eve, get up and shoot this event and still make it home to San Jose to shower, change and get to the race with time to spare.
So when it was 8:00 p.m. I went to bed (though I was unable to get to sleep till 9:00 p.m., waking up only briefly to get a Happy New Year text a little after midnight, then sleeping until 2:00 a.m. when my friend Chris heeding my Facebook request for people to call me early to help me wake up called to say “It’s 2:00 a.m., do you know where your friends are?”. In all fairness Gaius called also, yet at 3:30 a.m. I was almost at my destination, not sleeping.
I wasn’t sure if it would be too dark to shoot our goal, the beautiful moon, a moon blue in name if not in color, over the water, preferably with its light on the water below. At first I just used some very long exposures and high ISOs to create images like the one above (1250 ISO, f 2.8, 1 sec).
After shooting horizontal, vertical and tilts (the tilts were inspired by the posts I had to use as a make shift tripod), I started shooting details around me as if art paintings, including:
a fellow photographer’s camera:
the ocean through a rusty divider/crowd control device:
and a series of benches and posts of the type I used as my tripod substitute:
The moon was hidden beyond clouds for a lot of the time. Still as the day approached we got some flashes of light and some pretty blues and grays in the sky.
After a while I started wondering if perhaps I should leave at 5:00 a.m. since the moon wasn’t peeking through a lot. I really debated it and might have left, yet I decided I didn’t want to miss anything in case we got a dramatic image and I heard later that I missed out.
So that was the reason why I was on the beach when a loud bang rang out and some time later another. It turned out that someone decided to ring in the new year by firing a rifle (underwater for safety) twice. One of the photographers in my group had talked with him (though he was unable to talk him out of the idea) so he came back to the cliff area overlooking the beach where most of us had stayed. Soon when a ranger came by he was telling his story and then some unexpected action happened.
First many police arrived in several cars.
They interviewed potential witnesses (including some of us, I hadn’t seen the man or talked to him, though they took down my name and number anyhow), and started surveying the area with lights. At one point they had a light on a fellow photographer down on the beach and asked me to call him, which since not all of us had exchanged names was just me joining them in “hey photographer, come up here, the police want the beach cleared”.
I was having a discussion with myself that went something like, “We’ll they’re here, get some editorial shots now” mixed in with “Just get as close as you can without them taking your camera and memory card away”. I really don’t know if they were noticing what I was doing, I didn’t take that many shots of them, still I was surprised the officer in the below picture didn’t confiscate my camera or at least tell me to stop taking photos.
After I had a few good photos, I decided to ask if I would be able to leave at 6:00 a.m. as scheduled. I was told I would be. Then ten minutes later an officer told us they were temporarily closing the beach, yet we all had to go stand by the bathrooms (which happened to be locked the whole time) and wait. When I tried to explain that I needed to leave for a race I was told I would wait until they dismissed me. Though it seemed like hours, they did come back in about half and hour and tell us we could go back to taking photos, or leave.
Before I left I took a few more images, with the moon now ironically, casting a lot of light. While the moon was never blue, there were was a blue ring around it, and this last shot, straight out of camera, was one of my favorites. I’m glad I got up early and made the trek, the experience was definitely worth it.
Not So Still Life Photography Blog 