Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

Exploring and Photographing Sea Caves in San Diego

I’ve been photographing the sea caves around San Diego for the past several years. They are one of my favorite subjects, I really enjoy finding, exploring, and photographing them. To me, discovering a new cave is like coming across a hidden pirate’s treasure. I’m not sure why i’m so drawn to the caves but they’ve always seemed like a comfortable space offering a bit of protection from the elements and yet providing a view to the outside.

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Predicting Sunrise and Sunset Colors

The holy grail for landscape photographers is to be able to accurately predict sunrise and sunset colors. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of thinking that the sunset was going to be great only to have the colors fizzle out. Or perhaps you thought there wasn’t much potential and started driving home only to be stuck on the interstate when the colors exploded. In this article, I will discuss how I predict the colors for sunrise & sunset as well as link to the various tools that I use to inform my predictions.

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San Diego Henge and Scrippshenge

If you are a landscape photographer, you’ve probably heard of Manhattanhenge where the sunrise or sunset aligns with the streets of Manhattan. It’s an incredibly beautiful sight to witness with the warm light spilling all over the scene. However this isn’t just something limited to New York, and you’ll be glad to know we have this same effect in San Diego although it occurs on different dates.

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The Making of a Photo #2 – Crescent Moon Photography

This is the second in a series of “making of” articles where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on. This is intended to give an overview of the important decisions in a short and easily digestible manner. Crescent moon setting behind the California Tower in Balboa Park, San Diego on 4/21/23. Planning This photo of the crescent moon was taken on 4/21/23 which is two days after the new moon.

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End of Year Checklist for Photographers

Here’s a short end-of-year checklist for photgraphers. Make sure you have up-to-date backups of your files. If you don’t have any backups, now is a great time to start. The general rule is that you should have 3 copies of your data with at least one offsite. The offsite copy could be a hard drive at the inlaws house or in a safety deposit box. You can also use a cloud provider like Backblaze or Crashplan.

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