I (Jim) had a busy 4 weeks since the last meeting. Wanting to catch the Oct 17-18 Supermoon and Comet A3, I traveled inland for the weekend to find clearer skies. Unfortunately, the Santa Ana Winds were howling Friday, causing extremely hazy conditions the first day of shooting the Supermoon and comet. Day 2 was spent photographing Salton Sea’s Bombay Beach in the late afternoon & evening. This solo outing ended with photographing Comet A3 over Salton Sea after sunset. Day 3 started at the Palm Springs Air Museum – a great place for plane photos. Then I headed to Joshua Tree National Park for astrophotography, hoping to catch the Milky Way with Comet A3. It was a very enjoyable & successful 3-day photography trip.
The Dia de los Muertos Nov 2nd Old Town San Diego celebration was another fun photography outing. I enjoyed the meet-up although I wandered off in search of images (and missed the margarita break). One thing about joining other photographers on such an outing and separating, is you get to see their perspective of the same event. After viewing their images, I feel I need to zoom in and capture more closer detailed portraits. I tend to include all the costume detail and really liked their tighter perspective. I shared 12 images but include a few more here. Astrophotos were taken with a Nikon Z8 & Z7II with 105mm f2.8, 50mm f1.8, 20mm f1.8, and 16mm f1.8 lenses. Salton Sea/Bombay Beach & Palm Spring Air Museum were taken with a Fujifilm XPro2 with 10-18mm Sigma f2.8 lens (15-27mm effectively).

I participated in the full moon meetup on Sept 17th at Ski Beach Mission Bay. Photographing the moon during blue hour is always challenging especially when there are clouds. Fortunately, there was only a narrow band of low clouds above the moon horizon. With some post-processing and compositing of my moon over USD campus, here are my best images so far.
To follow the Above/Below theme, I went to Oceanside Harbor beach in search of shore birds. There were none so I made the best of it, opting to shoot surfers from the jetty. Fortunately, with a low tide and great conditions, I spent 90mins capturing thousands of images. Shooting from the jetty will hopefully qualify as “Above” eye-level. Surf photography is something I’ve wanted to do since seeing Barbara’s award winning photo she showed in August.