It has been about three years since I last took a significant amount of time away to just decompress. If there was ever a time, it was now, especially after dealing with the aftermath of pandemic burnout. It was taking its toll on me mentally.
With that all of the setbacks that I had to deal with over the last year now buried in the past, I was able to finally able to break away for a week and finally devote my time and attention towards photography. This was the beginning of my three week long chaotic stretch between a travel trip, a week of work, then another week of travel. I didn’t have much planned to tackle on this trip because I covered a lot of SF on my past three trips. This was more or less a perfect balance between actually relaxing and doing some photography in between. I took my time and didn’t rush anything. Seeing SF, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Davenport, Pescadero, and Pacifica were incredible places to visit! I don’t miss the gas prices up here or having to pay for parking everywhere I stop. It was good to spend some time with family while I was up here. This is probably the first vacation where I had a healthy balance of family time, relaxing, and photography. Usually it’s all photography and I am always on the run.
My primary objective and motivation for going back to do another Northern California trip was to do more astrophotography. It was starting to get to the tail end of Milky Way season and I wanted to shoot somewhere other than Malibu and Santa Barbara. The one area I was hell bent on making sure got executed was Pigeon Point Lighthouse. This was definitely the biggest challenge of my trip. I got incredibly lucky that I was able to get one clear night to shoot this because it was tough to do it the rest of the week I was there due to marine weather clouding up the sky. I am happy to walk away with one of my all time favorite images from this trip.
I still can’t get over how well executed this image was. This is definitely the best image that I have shot all year period. I’ll strive to do better, but there’s just too much going for this. I don’t any desire to do another trip back up here for years. I felt like I accomplished enough up here as is after 3 - 4 trips.