This is the third in my Sunset Beach Series. This is in Huntington Beach California, also know as Surf City.

Huntington Beach is known for its long 9.5 mile stretch of sandy beach, mild climate, excellent surfing.  Swells generated predominantly from the North Pacific in winter and from a combination of Southern Hemisphere in the summer focus on Huntington Beach creating consistent surf all year long, thus the nickname “Surf City, USA”.

Huntington Beach is about 2 hours south of where we live, so I planned on getting down there around noon in order to scout out the area and find a good location for sunset. Sunset that night was around 5:30pm. When we got down there, I was a little bit disappointed that the sky was clear without a cloud to be seen. As the day went on, clouds started to appear on the horizon and seemed to be rolling in towards our location. At about 4:30pm I made my way across the beach and down to waters edge and got my tripod all setup.

The beach had quite a few people enjoying themselves so it was definitely a challenge to time my photos without anyone in them. As it got closer to sunset there were many surfers making their way out of the water and onto the beach. I was very fortunate to get one of them to tale a moment to stand still and pose so that I could get him in the photo. It was important to have him stand still due to the slow shutter speed that I was using at the time. I used my Nikon D7100 camera body with the Nikon 14-24mm wide angle lens. I used the camera settings of f22 aperture, iso 100, at 1/3 second shutter speed. This ended up being a great sunset. I was very fortunate that the clouds moved in and provided that brilliant sky color to the scene.