Dates: August 8-12, 2021
Sorry for dragging out these posts from our summer trip. I was (non-COVID) sick for a couple of weeks but I’m back! My previous post was about the fun we had with the kids and grandkids on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and the tourist train. In this post I’m sharing some of the beautiful views we had from our deck at the Beach Street Inn and Suites motel and a couple of walks on the wharf.
The wharf is nicely lit at night – view from our hotel deck.
Here is a daytime view.
Looking back from the wharf you can see the motel we stayed at. We were on the right side of the top level deck in the 3 level structure
The wharf has plenty of restaurants and lots of places to fish. Walking along I found this wonderful sculpture of an octopus and an oyster wrapped around some plumbing.
All along the waterfront you can hear sea lions barking; a small colony has found perches around the base of the wharf.
But there was plenty more to see from our vantage point: plenty of birds and sailboats. The weather was very nice and at times there were close to a dozen boats catching the wind. I took these two pictures with my Sony RX10 IV.
I’m impressed with the results from this little 1-inch sensor camera.
And it wouldn’t be the Pacific coast without seagulls and pelicans. This guy was on a chimney less than 30 feet from our deck.
The rest of these bird pictures were taken on a walk along the wharf with my Sony RX100 VII – my walk around camera. First another seagull
One evening as we were walking along the wharf after dinner, Brian, Marie, Carla and I saw this pelican looping around. I put my Sony RX100 into fast burst mode and clicked away. I ended up taking close to 100 pictures – but at 10 frames / second it doesn’t take too long to grab that many. First here s/he is cruising above Monterey Bay
I had to keep going back-and-forth and side-to-side to keep up with him but I finally got a picture of it landing in the water.
To be fair none of these pictures are “out of the camera”. I shoot raw images so I have to use a post processor (LightRoom Classic) to get a “good” image. Then for the two pelican pictures I used Topaz Labs Sharpen AI. You can read/see more details about the Topaz Labs product in this post on using their Denoise and Sharpen tools.
I’ll try to get my posts on Carmel and Monterey Bay Aquarium up quickly so I can move past last summer!
