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From "All Mine!" to "All Mine! The Way It Should Be"

All Mine!

One of the places I first visited after buying my Nikon D800 in 2012 was Windansea Beach in La Jolla, California, in order to capture the shack.

But how you capture an iconic scene that has been photographed many times before is always a creative challenge. Sometimes I do some research before I go to a location by looking at it on Google Earth from different perspectives (for example for my shot of "Good Morning Coachella!" on YouTube). Then, when I get there, I take lots of photographs from different angles after walking around a bit. This time it was different.

I was able to park my car in the little parking lot along Neptune Place and I walked over to where Bonair St hits Neptune. I put my tripod on the sidewalk, stuck my camera on it and pointed it towards the shack. I also put a neutral density filter and a polarizer filter on the camera, in order to take a long exposure: 

I took my first photo with an exposure of 30 seconds, which smoothes out any waves on the ocean. Then, for whatever reason, my photo “La Jolla Shores Surfer” popped into my mind, in which I also took a long exposure, but followed it by a short one when a surfer was coming out of the water. Later, I combined these, showing a surfer in sharp focus on the beach walking from a smooth ocean. I could do that here too, but with a guy on a wave.

After removing the filters by leaving the camera on the tripod, in order not to change the composition, I waited for a guy on a wave and a few minutes later I captured it with a short exposure:

So my first two photos I ever took at Windansea Beach resulted in this after I combined them later at home:

and called it “All Mine!”.

After these shots I captured a whole bunch more, including “To Windansea” which appeared on the cover of L’Chaim magazine in September 2024.

“All Mine!” turned out to be one of my best selling images and it sold out 5 years later. I only kept two Artist’s Proofs, one at 12x24 inches and one at 30x60 inches. Last month I decided to embed the 12x24” print that is printed on Fuji Crystal Archive Pearl Photo Paper in resin and offer it for sale.

All Mine! The Way It Should Be

In September of 2023 I was thinking about what new piece I could take to the La Jolla Art and Wine Festival the next month. I was thinking of “All Mine!” but wanted to prevent creating something that looks too similar. I have had a drone (named Rolf) for a while and then it came to me: I could have the shack in it again, plus a single surfer on a single wave, but looking back from the ocean towards land.

After parking my car on Nautilus Street I walked over to the shack and took Rolf out of the bag. All the conditions were good to fly a drone. After some initial stills and videos I flew Rolf out far enough beyond where this iconic wave always breaks more or less in the same way (surfers have told me there is a little reef there that makes the wave break predictably), and pointed him back to land.

I took a photo with the wide angle lens. It didn’t quite look the way I wanted it. The shack and surfers were too small in the frame.

Fortunately, my drone has two cameras, a wide angle and a telelens.

So I got another shot with the telelens. That was much better as the surfer was a good size, but the shack was just outside the frame.

Since I cannot take a vertically oriented photo with Rolf I captured a few more photos from shack to sky and stitched them all together later resulting in this:

That’s exactly what I was going for.

Now it still needed a title. I thought of “All Mine! II”, but set aside that pretty quickly. I don’t quite remember but it was probably my wife who came up with the original “All Mine!” as she often comes up with better titles than I do. 

One time while she was on the phone with her business partner we texted her the new image. She called her husband - who is a surfer - and we told them that the first image was called “All Mine!”. “And that’s the way it supposed to be!” he blurted out on the other side of the line. Now, the image was complete.

Since then I have hand colored black and white versions of it at various sizes.