Malibu Bioluminescence

jackfusco (44)in #photography • 7 years ago

These photos are a couple months old now, but they're definitely some of my favorites and I wanted to share a bit of the story behind them. It was a night that two of my dream shots unexpectedly lined up together. I had been returning to this particular beach for 2 years trying to get a proper photo of the Milky Way from inside this seacave, but everything kept working against me. The tide needs to be super low, the weather needs to be clear, and that needs to coincide with the Moonphase and the Milky Way being in the right position of the sky to make it all happen.

Now, I've always wanted to see / photograph bioluminescence, but just haven't had the opportunity. When I moved out to the West Coast a little over 3 years ago, I did as much research about it as possible, but didn't find much. I set Google alerts for "San Diego red tide", "west coast bioluminescence" but really only ended up with a bunch of random articles.

On this night in Malibu, I made my way down the beach to big cave I had been trying to photography and was more than excited when everything lined up. I snapped a few photos and made my way shooting through the rest of the beach. My friend and I were just about to leave when I yelled over to him that I was going to head back to the cave. I wasn't sure when I would have the opportunity to shoot this cave again, so I wanted to shoot it again but a bit differently. That's when it happened

There was a slight glow when the waves crashed and it was glowing blue on the back of my camera. They didn't show up anywhere else or any earlier in the night. If I didn't randomly decide to make a run back to the cave, I would've left happy with the photos I had, but I never would've known about the bioluminescence. It ended up lasting a good month and my next trip back to the beach found it incredibly busy (for 11pm at a beach) with people there to check it out. It was pretty awesome and exciting to see. Hope you guys enjoy the photos and my first post (aside from the intro) here!