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We had a heckuva storm on Friday and a bit more on Saturday, and it really roiled the ocean. We went to Treasure Island Park in Laguna Beach early this morning and saw lots of crashing surf and splashing waves. I don’t recall ever seeing the sea so active in Laguna, at least not recently. The pictures don’t really do it justice, but you can get some idea of what we saw. The video shows the waves on some rocks – I liked watching the water drain off the rock as the wave subsides.
I recently got an iPhone 6s+ and wanted to see how good the 4K video is, so I took a few yesterday at Treasure Island Park. Since these are coming to you via YouTube, they’ve all been processed and will not quite have the quality of the originals. I look forward to checking them out on the Hiperwall this week.
And finally a test of the SloMo capability. This was shot at 720p/240 FPS. I’m curious how YouTube will handle it. (It turns out that YouTube seems not to respect the SloMo at all and just plays it normally, presumably discarding all those extra frames.)
Last Sunday, we decided to visit Treasure Island Park next to and behind the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, because a storm in the Pacific was causing bigger than usual waves. It was a cloudy morning, but a pleasant temperature for a walk. The first pictures are of the arch, then a few pics of the waves, and finally, we saw a couple of whales near the beach. My iPhone has no zoom, so they just look like black specks, but I think the 2nd picture of the whales shows one of them spouting.
I also took a few videos. The first two show waves crashing on the beach, while the second is a guy using a drone to film some girls dancing on a rock. I was impressed with how fast and precise the drone was!
This morning, we woke to magnificent blue skies, not the marine layer predicted by the weatherman, so we went back to Treasure Island Park, but this time I took my good camera. The tide was much lower than last week, but no whales this time…
The sunset last night was spectacular. I presume the smoke from the Colby fire in North Los Angeles County made the reds and oranges pop even more. These are unretouched photos (well, resized only) that show the color we saw. Catalina Island is the most prominent island in the photos, but San Clement Island is visible in one or two. Click on the photos to get a larger size image. We went out to our favorite Mexican food place (Avila’s El Ranchito) last night, then took a nice walk on the beach. It was supposed to be a lousy, cold, overcast day, but it turned into a delightful evening. Click the pictures to see a full-sized version. All taken with iPhones, so expect noise in the low light images.
And I even got a movie of the sun sinking beneath the waves.
Today quickly switched from a pleasant Sunday to a little too exciting when my wife arrived home from grocery shopping and yelled “Fire!” At almost the same instant, I could smell smoke and there was a helicopter flying over the house. Once my heart started beating again, I saw that the fire was south of us and that the helicopter was fighting it with water drops. We walked to a hillside sort of above the fire as the smoke enveloped us and ash fell. Before long, we returned home in case we needed to evacuate. It turned out that the helicopter was refilling on a ridge near us, so we got some amazing views of the thing roaring over us. A newspaper report details the fire:Â http://www.ocregister.com/articles/fire-371632-beach-brush.html I took a bunch of pictures and here are the best ones:
I also took some movies. This one shows the chopper flying up a canyon on its way to refill.
Here it is on the way back to the fire.
Flying over us on the way to refill:
A close view of it approaching us:
We had yet another amazing sunset last night, as the following pictures show. Click on them, because the thumbnails don’t do them justice and often cut off important bits.
When I awoke this morning, the moon was brightly visible as the sun was rising. I grabbed my camera and took these shots. I’m trying to learn to be a better photographer, so I am at least shooting in RAW now and with Aperture Priority mode. This is the first time I’ve used Adobe Lightroom, but it did a nice job of making these photos presentable.
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