Our La Jolla sunset Last Night was Spectacular

This is a new image that I am calling "Simon's Cliche." 

Last night we saw a beautiful sunset as the red light reflected off the high clouds which were overhead because they were blowing off the top of the Tropical Storm Simon to the south of San Diego in Baja California. 

Last night in la Jolla (Hospital's Reef) was yet another memorable sunset full of color and clouds that I got to spend with my dog, a couple visiting from the Netherlands on a photography tour of the California coast (Berrai and Bianca), and a cool surfer named Kevin who sort of inspired me to create this composition which is a bit different from my recent norm.

Usually, I do not like using surfers in my images, well, I gave it some thought on my drive home from the beach last night and decided to process this image from last night. A surfer climbed out of the water in front of me right at sunset last night, and I knew I had captured a pretty nice ghosted shot of him with the sun on the horizon just as he turned his back on me and looked back over the ocean and the other surfers before deciding to make his way off the reef onto the beach.

So, after talking with Kevin at length, while I was shooting with my dog at my side, and the tide was coming up and over the top of the reef at about 5 feet soaking my lower body and The Dude (my dog), I was inspired to go with this composition after deciding to go outside of my norms...

Btw, it is seldom, if ever, that I process an image taken the night before on the next day for print, but with this composition being a bit different for me, I think I wanted to get it out there and see other people's reactions...let me know what you think...

Camera settings: ISO-100, f/2.8 at 24mm for 13 seconds captured at 6:26pm as the sun was setting and the tide was almost high ...for the in-camera effects I wanted, along with limiting my depth of field (using f/2.8), I used one Lee ProGlass ND 3.0 filter (10 stops) to permit the 13 sec exposure with a large aperture and one Lee .75ND Soft Grad (2.5 stops) to bring down the brightness of the sky even with the rocks and the surfer...

Btw, the name comes from the Tropical System, "Simon" and the fact that putting a surfer into a seascape photo is very "cliche"...

I hope you like this one...it is a bit off-pace for me.

peace,
D. "Bodhi"