The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Well, today I have no words of wisdom, no keen insights to share, no technical photo mumbo jumbo. Instead I will give a run through on my day leading up to and after this photo was taken.

The Good: While driving, I saw there were some nice clouds out that inspired me to think about the possibility of going out shooting.
The Bad: I was driving to San Leandro (3 hour round trip) on my day off, an industrial city surrounded by other industrial cities to deal with some of my prints that were mounted and had to be fixed.
The Ugly: The traffic on the way home when someone's large volume of cardboard was strewn across all three lanes.

The Good: My girlfriend Kendra had dinner waiting for me when I got home!
The Bad: I ate too many tortellinis at dinner. Bad Jim!
The Ugly: I wound up tasting tortellinis for the rest of the night.

The Good: I started using Facebook more and rounded up Lukas and his fiancée to go shoot sunset.
The Bad: I started using Facebook more.
The Ugly: I am now signed up for three social sites starting with the letter F (Friendster, Flickr, Facebook). Freakin' fantastic.

The Good: In a cell phone dead zone, we were able to meet up and get to our final destination with just enough time to catch the sunset.
The Bad: Huge mats of decaying algae and kelp offered up a pungent aroma while we walked along the beach.
The Ugly: A couple of dead sea lions added to the bouquet of smells. These sea lions were so far gone, the sea gulls were surrounding one of them but not doing anything. I could imagine them saying to each other, "I dare you to take a bite. Come on, I double dog dare you." None of them seemed to be succumbing to the peer pressure.

The Good: The sunset delivered a fine display of light and color. Nothing mind blowing, but compared to fog, it certainly was a treat.
The Bad: The tide and lack of wave action made for less than exciting conditions below the sky.
The Ugly: We had to walk back the way we came, and no the seagulls were still not interested in bloated pinniped with a side of beach wrack.
The REALLY Ugly: As we transitioned from the beach to the field back to our cars, we could see the smoke and fiery glow from a fire less than 2 hours old that has now consumed nearly 3,000 acres and caused roughly 2,000 people to evacuate their homes.

Be safe everyone, and may the good outshine the bad and the ugly!

Nikon D300
Nikkor 12-24mm @ 12mm
3 exposures @ f16, ISO 100
Singh-Ray .9 Reverse GND Filter
Lee .9 Hard GND Filter