Call it Cron. Local surfers do. Maybe ‘Rodee-o’ Beach, ‘Roday-o’ Beach or just the Headlands. But Rodeo Beach at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands is a bit too much of a mouth full.
There’s a rocky beach out there, cliffs, bikes, hikes, ex-Nike missile sites. Plenty of flora and fauna. A lighthouse, a mammal center; rabbits and such.
As a surf spot, let’s be generous and call it an idiosyncratic surf break. The kind of spot where experienced surfers like myself can look brilliant one moment, hacking and slicing across an open wave face. The next, sent cartwheeling underwater and rolled up the beach shaking sand from inside my wetsuit trunks.
When I’m not in the water, I photograph local surfers from the beach. Besides the occasional distraction of gale force winds, lousy surf, beach dogs who insist on dropping a wet tennis ball in front of me to kick so they may chase--repeat--until the toe of my shoe is soaked in slobber. Or there’s no one in the water to shoot. It’s the one enemy I have out there.
Fog.
When I began the quest to shoot my friends surfing at their best, I generally felt pretty good about our local fog. Keeps us cool in summer; love the horns. If you live here, and I know you do, you know what I’m talking about. But drizzle and fog make for miserable lighting conditions for shooting action. Low light is one of the root causes of photographic ‘noise,’ the unattractive element of digital grain in a photo accompanied by pixelated swirlings (Wait? Isn’t there a rock band out of Seattle called The Swirlings?) Should be.
Photographic noise put a huge ding in my desire to ‘master the art of point-and-shoot photography.’ Then a happy accident occured. While using editing software to try and rid the noise from a photo, I accidentally dragged a wild, neo-impressionist color scheme across the page. I immediately thought of my mother, who, when I was young, dragged me to an art exhibit. The collection of impressionism at The Palace of The Legion of Honor, “Les Fauves” (the wild beasts), named for their bold use of color, I never forgot.
I began to feed the noise and exploit the grain in the photo, adding wild color gradients in noisy areas and highlighting low-lit details until the image erupted into a field of wildflowers. I was hooked. I was breaking the rules of traditional photo editing and I was eager to get creative.
Seeing something in a new light, looking at things in a new way, you never know what you might find. If it weren’t for the fog and a little bit of noise, and my mom, I might not have discovered the joys of shooting photos of my friends surfing Cron.
10/10