While we were in the San Francisco By Area, saving Christmas and visiting my 97-year-old mother, and we were on that day trip to a beach very near the Golden Gate Bridge…

I mean very near… I started a new photographic experiment. I want to get the perfect photo of a wave just as it curls and begins to fall.

Like my attempts to take the perfect photo of a dog shaking water off itself, or the dew-covered flowers and spider web photos, this is a little harder than I originally expected.

That is a good one, you can see the shade of the curl inside the wave. But timing is everything in this game.

Also, it didn’t help that this beach, being near the opening to the Bay, is at an angle to the surf. That one was taken too late.

That one, too early.

One microsecond late on that one. Hurry up, shutter!

I like that one.

I think I tried something like this with waves crashing against rocks on a beach somewhere.

But it does beg the question; why didn’t I think of this in San Diego, where I now live, where it is warm all year long, and the beaches have the common decency to face the ocean?

Even when your timing is off, you still end up with a nice photo of a wave.

And I suppose I could crop the images to the best part of each wave.

But whatever, man, it’s all for fun, right?