Krysta Kaos at Sunset Cliffs

San Diego was a little bit of a struggle for me.  It is easily one of the most beautiful cities in the entire country.  Its amazing beaches, cliffs, forests, and architecture always leaves me amazed, but its sunny pretty much every day.  Shooting really early in the morning is great, but after a month of camping and sleeping in my car it was hard as hell to get out of bed at the ungodly 5am sunrise to catch some fog.

Also I destroyed my leg the first day I was in town.  Hiking down to this cave to plan out my shoots for the week I fell between two boulders, and saved my camera instead of my leg.  It hurt like hell, and it continued to hurt for over a month.  I've added photos as attachments, so feel free to opt out of viewing the damage, but suffice it to say every hike I did until Ohio caused me a ridiculous amount of pain.  On the plus side I'm stubborn as hell, and so I still made images as often as possible, and hiked and shot every day.

My shoot with Krysta the day after the fall still went really well.  We waited until late in the day and shot through sunset to get nice lighting.  The reflection of the light in the cave gave a beautiful softness to the photos, and I am really really happy with how the images turned out.  The only that sucked about this amazing place was the graffiti.  These images have been heavily heavily fixed because people find these places and trash them, so if you happen to make it to sunset cliffs and hike down to this spot don't yell at me for misleading you.  Shooting here was work.  The light is great, the location is great, but the graffiti sucks.

These were mostly shot with my 85mm F1.4 because the light in the cave while beautifully soft was very very dim, and I can actually get a more useable image shooting at 1/100th of a second at F1.4 than I can with my 17-40mm at 1/20th of a second at F4.  I think the compression of the lens makes high iso noise a little less noticeable.  Despite the fact that they do have the same amount of noise.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nai446mm6ona37f/AAC8fVe1SuiAkbhiwMo6Q2Xra?dl=0