Leon Turnbull Photography

This is sunrise on Tomales Bay, last weekend.

The sun forgot to drink her coffee on this morning. She was rather grumpy and didn’t want to get out of bed. In fact, she was about 25 minutes late getting up. I know you don’t believe me, but it is true. I was waiting around an extra long time for the sun to rise this morning. And I hadn’t had “my coffee” yet. And I was getting quite hungry as well. Finally, the sun made her appearance. I was beginning to wonder if she would. I took my shot, packed up my camera, and hurried on back to our lodge to get some breakfast and coffee. My family was still all sleeping! My wife always likes to sleep in, but the kids are usually up at the break of dawn, so I was quite surprised they were still in bed. Time to wake up people! Gotta get out and enjoy the sun, she might decide to go to bed early today. 🙂

Pelicans are such interesting birds. Their beak obviously is strange. But also their face and eyes are really fascinating to look at. I love how they fly so low along the ocean just above the waves, and often in groups.

I had lots of opportunity to photograph these birds on our weekend trip to Pt. Reyes. We were at Limantour Beach one morning, and there were plenty of pelicans flying up the coastline along the shore. I got out my 100-400mm lens and just started shooting away from the shoreline.

This was my favourite, but here are a couple more:

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.