The hubby and I recently made a trip to Fort Bragg, CA just a few miles north of the town of Mendocino to get some much-needed vacation time in. While we were there, I took advantage of the lovely scenery and took a bunch of pictures.
I’d love to take all the credit for these shots, but it’s really hard to take a bad picture when the scenery is just so incredible: 
The following two shots are of a huge redwood stump that had washed up onshore. The way you frame and angle shots can change the mood of the same subject dramatically. The first shot frames the end of the stump against the background and fills the center of the shot and captures how big the stump is. The second is a close up of the same angle that shows the detail of the wood:
Scenic pictures are typically shot in landscape mode (they don’t call it “landscape” for nothing!) but don’t ignore the portrait mode when shooting a scenic photo. As the following pictures show, it can focus on different aspects of the same scene, in this case making the sky and the rocks seem closer, while the center of the picture seems farther away, which adds more depth to the photo:
The best photography tip I can probably ever give you is to just take a LOT of pictures… in the digital age, we no longer have to worry about the expense of film (am I dating myself here?) and with memory cards in the gigabytes and computer hard drives in the terabytes, and of course the fabulous option to delete and retake pictures on the fly, there’s really no excuse not to do this. Take at least two pictures of the same subject (just in case one is out of focus or a bug lands on your lens and you don’t realize it until you’re looking at the pictures later; both situations have happened to me, and more than once), and take several different angles and frames of the same subject, as demonstrated by the photos below. At the very worst, you’ll just be deleting a bunch of photos off your hard drive, but you are increasing your odds at capturing some really nice shots of your subject, and maybe more than one:
While we were in Fort Bragg, we stood at The Surf and Sand Lodge right off of Hwy 1. I highly recommend them. The rooms are nice, clean, quiet, and only 50 yards away from the ocean. The views from the rooms are spectacular in fact, a lot of the pics you see here were shot from the balcony off of our second-floor room. It’s also right on a ten-mile walking path which will take you along the coastline to MacKerricher State Park, both of which will offer you a ton of great photo opportunities.
If you have any questions about the photos above, or you’ve stayed in Fort Bragg yourself and want to share your experience (photo-taking or otherwise) leave a comment!
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