Little Corona del Mar Beach

Author's Comments

The arch is the photograph everyone comes for, and I understand the impulse, but the arch is not the reason I keep coming back. The reason is the tidepools. At a negative low tide on a winter morning, the reef shelf at Little Corona becomes a different kind of landscape entirely - shallow basins holding sky, anemones the color of bruised plums, the wet rock catching whatever pink the sunrise is willing to give. You have to be there early. The beach faces roughly southwest, so the light at dawn does not strike the water directly, and that is the gift. Everything goes soft and reflective before the sun clears the bluff. Work the arch when you arrive, because the geometry only opens up at low tide and the window is short. A long exposure here will smooth the surge into something almost gauzy, and the frame the arch makes is genuinely useful - it gives you a foreground, a middle, a horizon, all in one composition. Then turn around. The sea caves at the south end frame the Pacific through narrow openings, and the detail work in there is endless if you slow down. The path down is steeper than it looks. Parking is a small ordeal on weekends. None of that matters at six in the morning in February when you are the only person on the sand and the tide is running out and the rock is wet and dark and the light is doing what light does for about twenty minutes before it becomes ordinary again.

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