T-Street Beach

Author's Comments

There is a particular photograph I have been trying to make at T-Street for a long time, and I have not quite gotten it. I want the train in the frame, the Surfliner moving south along the tracks, with the surf breaking on the cobblestone point and the bluff falling away in the foreground. The window is small. The train passes, the light is right, the swell cooperates, or it does not. Most evenings something is missing. The stairway down from the blufftop is the composition I keep returning to in the meantime. From maybe a third of the way down, the coast bends south toward San Diego County in a long soft curve, and at golden hour in October the sandstone goes the color of dried apricot while the water below stays cool and blue. The contrast is what makes it. Warm cliff, cold sea, the line of track running through the middle like a seam. I shoot wide here, almost always. The scale of the bluff and the openness of the horizon do not reward a tight lens. Long exposures work too, especially in the last twenty minutes of light, when the cobblestone break smooths into something painterly and the train, if it comes, draws a streak of motion through the frame. Check the Amtrak schedule before you go. It is the difference between a photograph you planned and one you got lucky with, and on a bluff with a hundred steps between you and the sand, you want to have planned.

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