The top tip for taking good photos is to first go to a place that has a great scene almost everywhere you point the camera. Then point the camera and shoot. Goat Rock Beach on the Sonoma coast a couple hours north of San Francisco is one of those locations. In the winter there can be high surf from distant storms even when the local temperatures are mild. This past week temperatures were not bad, in the 50s, but strong winds whipped up foam on the breakers.

Goat rocks juts out into the ocean. A previous post showed an overview in cow parsnip season.

There is a parking lot at the base of the Rock affording views of the coast in both directions. Looking north (in the camera direction of the cow parsnip scene) from the afternoon shadow of the rock, a took this frame:

The scene doesn’t need much help from Photoshop™, but I did make a few minor tweaks. Here is the plan:

The winds filled the sky with a fine mist, threatening to frost the camera lens and also fading the distant terrain. I increased the contrast and color saturation above the shoreline to bring back some of the character.

The rock intruding on the lower right seemed distracting, so I cropped most of it out. Cropping lost some of the short. A left a little of the rock in the scene to minimize the loss, and then painted out the remaining fragment using the rubber stamp tool in Photoshop.

Finally, a lightened the foreground rocks using Adjust > Highlights and shadows.

An enlarged version is here.

In support of the contention that there is a good scene pretty much no matter where you look, here is the view of Arched Rock looking south from the parking lot.

An enlarged version is here.

You get to know the character of an oft-visited place. When the winter surf is up, I know to visit Goat rock Beach … with a camera, not a surf board, that is.