Sunbeams

That’s the the bay of Cassis, France. It’s a beautiful area. The geography of the place is dynamic, with fabulous ochre-coloured calanques – narrow, steep-walled inlets – that make for some wonderful scenery along the coast.

I wanted to include this one in my Atmosphere images but it was shot with a small point and shoot camera (a Canon G10 for the gear heads out there) and the aspect ratio of it didn’t line up with the traditional 3:2 of 35mm that is in all the others within that group. The shot has all the elements that crank my crank; earth, sea, sky. And those sunbeams get me every time I come across them. This is on the east side of the bay along the road between Cassis and La Ciotat; around Cap Canaille looking toward the west. When I would shoot with that camera, I would often take a photo – a similar – with the 35mm ratio in mind. In other words, I would leave space for cropping things down from the camera’s native 4:3. In this instance, I was so gobsmacked by the scenery and those beams that I forgot. If I tried cropping to fit the 35mm ratio now, I’d lose those dark clouds up top.

I would have loved to hang around Cassis longer and watch the sun take its pitch below the horizon but we had agreed that driving on unknown, windy, cliff-side roads in the dark was something that we would try to avoid, if at all possible. We were a little over an hour’s drive away from our accommodations and waiting until sunset would have put us driving in the dark along some pretty amazing (and scary) roads.