Huntington Beach Pier

Author's Comments

The pier is almost too obvious. Eighteen hundred feet of concrete walking straight into the sun, surfers stacking up on either side of the pilings, Catalina floating on the horizon when the air is clean enough to allow it. Everyone with a camera has shot this place, and most of those photographs look the same. The version I keep working toward is from underneath. At low tide in winter, when the sun sets far enough south to align with the length of the pier, you can stand among the pilings and watch the geometry collapse into a single vanishing point. The beams overhead become a ceiling. The light comes in horizontally, raking through the columns, and for maybe ten minutes the whole structure reads as a cathedral built for the Pacific. You will get wet. Bring a tripod you do not mind rinsing. The other photograph worth the wait is the silhouette. Surfers paddle out near the pilings in the last hour of light, and if you frame tight from the beach with a longer lens, you can catch a single figure against the sun with the pier cutting a hard horizontal across the top of the frame. It is a composition that needs patience more than skill. The surfer has to be in the right place. The wave has to cooperate. Most evenings nothing aligns and you go home with something looser. Come in January or February when the sun sets furthest south and the crowds are at their thinnest. Golden hour here is genuinely golden, the kind of light that makes the wet sand mirror everything above it. Stay through blue hour. The pier lights come on, and the photograph changes entirely.

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