David J.
 First Officer
Flight distance : 1231385 ft
United States
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Over the past years, a family tradition has emerged. The days after Christmas, which often are a downtime with much less excitement then the days leading up to Christmas, are now instead replaced with a trip to the beach. Short, usually just a couple days, is the perfect amount of time to reset and relax after the chaos of the Christmas season. This year’s trip was the first with my new Mavic Air. Here are a few pictures I took to cap off the year of 2018!
The sand offered tons of intricate patterns created by water running into the ocean.
A tributary spreads out, patterning the sand. A quick tip: most of the time, patterns in nature are best captured from directly above preserving the perspective.
A close-up to really bring out the detail in the sand’s patterns.
It almost looks as if two hands are holding a gem. The transition of colors from green bushes to grey rocks to brown sands helps the composition.
Waves also turned out to be a great subject for shooting.
The timing to get a wave just as it is crashing is the hardest. A trick is to not use ND filters and speed up the shutter to around 1/240 (it will change depending on light) in order to catch the wave breaking without any motion blur.
These rocks literally popped out at me. The foam around them creates a cool layered feel—the rocks, then the foam, and finally the water.
The same sort of idea, but instead of rocks, there is the suggestion of a set of waves, one after the other diagonally across the frame.
Finally, I was extremely lucky to get this picture - the right wave at the right time. Only one time did I see a sea lion the whole trip and I was able to get a picture! You can see it quite small just to the right of where the line of foam and the wave intersect. He was riding the wave!
The small town of Oceanside was quite quaint and cozy.
The town is built into the hillside giving most houses a wonderful view of the ocean.
Just off the coast is the Three Arch Rocks Nationa Wildlife Refuge. They are home to one of the largest colonies of breeding tufted puffins.
One of my favorite photos, this is the road leading into town. I love the parallelism that the beach and ocean on one side and the signature green foliage of the Oregon coast on the other. Tip: use your first couple flights (if you are at a location for a couple days) to scout out possible shots with good composition. Then, return to those locations at the best time to create the look you are going for.
The sun setting over the small downtown creates a picturesque view from the air. At dusk, it becomes harder to retain detail in shadows while not over-exposing other parts of the shot. The trick is to shoot in RAW photo format not only at dusk, but all the time. I always shoot in RAW to maintain the best results. When I first learned about it I was skeptical. Editing programs were bound to cost me tons of money and are often quite confusing at first. But in reality editing RAW photos is a breeze. If you want to keep it cheap, actually free, and easy while still having great results, you can just download Adobe Lightroom CC for your mobile device. It works great and is free!
My younger brother was brave enough to bear the ice-cold waters just long enough to catch a couple waves before sunset.
One last picture for my profile
I hope you enjoyed and any and all critiques are welcome!
*I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the picture below, so I guess here is one more  *
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