Leon Turnbull Photography

I did not want to photograph this old lug of a boat. It has been done and overdone. I have probably seen a hundred photos of this boat. And frankly, it didn’t really interest me too much anymore to photograph it.

But … I was in the area. I was actually within walking distance of the boat from where I shot the sunrise. And the light was still very good. I figured I may as well go see it. I said to myself that if I were to photograph it, I wanted to get a reflection of the boat in the water. That was my goal. I was not too pleased with my results though. The one photograph I took that had a good reflection, was not a very good composition, so I hucked it. I liked the composition on this shot better, but the reflection isn’t all that great. Nonetheless, this is the photo I liked better.

In case you didn’t know and have never heard of this boat before, the boat is called the “Point Reyes” and is located in the town of Inverness in Pt. Reyes Natl. Seashore, in the Tomales Bay. It is very easy to get to. It is also quite firmly entrenched here and is not going to be moved anytime ever.

We were staying in a nice, albeit expensive, little cottage in the town of Inverness Park, at Point Reyes. The couple there owned one cottage that they rented out to tourists. I think they were quite rather surprised at us, that we didn’t just “stay there at the cottage” all day long. Instead, of course, we wanted to get out and see things, go hiking ,go to the beach, see the scenery, etc. Apparently, most of their guests don’t do much of that, they just stay at the cottage all day. It may be a nice cottage and all, but what would be the point of doing that? I don’t get it. You’re gonna drive all the way out of the city to the ocean, and not even bother going to see it?

Of course, I was even worse than that. I got up at unbelievable hours to go photograph the sunrise. I probably almost gave the nice couple a heart-attack when they learned that I did that. Apparently, I did wake them when I turned on the car ignition in the morning too. Oh well.

This is a pre-dawn shot of a pier on Tomales Bay in Inverness. There were zero clouds in the sky again, except for the one little one there on the left side of the frame. I tried to make the most use of it in my photo that I could.

After photographing Mr. Skunk and running up and down the beach to warn my family of their impending doom, I set about to photographing the sunset. There was not a cloud to be found in the sky this evening, which makes for a rather boring sunset in terms of being very colorful (don’t tell God I said that – ha ha). This was about the best I could do this evening. I guess it is not all that bad, but I was hoping for a bit better photo. At least I got one decent photo this night. On the second night we were here, I got zero photos at sunset thanks to Mr. Fog.

McClures Beach is really a great beach for photography, maybe the best in all of Point Reyes. Thus, I was quite surprised that we were the only ones on the entire beach this evening. You gotta like that. I also think, however, that the beach is probably better and more interesting at low tide. When we here it was high tide at around sunset. I probably should’ve known better and planned our weekend get-away on a different weekend. Oh well. There is always next time.

On Saturday, we went out hiking to Chimney Rock at Point Reyes Natl. Seashore. There is a short hike to an elephant seal overlook. It is not the time of year to see elephant seals; a ranger told us that in the spring there are up to 1500 seals here (I definitely must return to see that). Anyway, we did happen to see a couple of male seals here. One was just laying on the beach sleeping. My wife thought he was dead. It turned out that was definitely not the case, because this other guy came swimming up to the beach while we were at the overlook, making a heckuva lot of noise along the way. He slowly swam up to the beach, which promptly woke up the other one, who tried to scamper away from it. It is funny to watch these creatures flop about on the land. It is also funny that they are so bad at sharing. It is a darn big beach. You would think that it would be big enough to comfortably allow two elephant seals to both take a nap. Anyway, they both ended up getting back in the water, and swam away. We were definitely very fortunate to witness these two seals in “action”. This photo was taken with my 100-400mm lens with a 1.4x extender.

We just returned from a great weekend trip to Point Reyes, near San Francisco. It was so nice to get away from the heat for awhile in Sacramento. We saw quite a bit of wildlife on the weekend there (stay tuned for more pictures), but certainly the most wild and crazy thing we saw was this skunk on McClures Beach! I have never in all my years seen a skunk on the beach. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a skunk in the wild before.

Anyway, after work on Friday we drove on over to the coast, got dinner, checked into our lodge, then headed for McClures Beach for sunset. We had the entire beach to ourselves (except for the seagulls and this little critter). Awesome. I headed on down to the south side of the beach to find a photo op. I had put my camera bag down in the sand, then went down closer to the ocean to see if I could find a good composition that I wanted for a photo. I turned around and there was this skunk right by my camera bag! Where the heck did this thing come from??? He was paying absolutely no attention to me. It seemed like he didn’t even notice me the entire time. He continued on by my camera bag, continuing on down the beach, sniffing the sand, looking for food. I went back and collected my camera, and started taking photos of it as he meandered down the beach.

Now I had a dilemna. It was getting close to sunset, and I wanted to get some photos before the sun had set. But Mr. Skunk (or Mrs. Skunk?) was continuing on up the beach right where my wife and kids were playing in the sand. They were far up the beach, and could not see it yet. I was afraid they wouldn’t notice it in time, and when the skunk got up to them, the kids would freak out, and the skunk would freak out, and then you know what would happen. Phew! I didn’t want to have to deal with any extra smelly kids this evening. So I left my camera (the seagulls were watching over it for me), and ran down the beach in my bare feet (going wide around the skunk). I got back to my family, warned them of the skunk coming, told them not go up and pet it or anything, then ran back down the beach to my camera, to take my sunset photos. Man, was that ever tiring! But what a fun evening!