Patterns in the sand have always had a fascination for me, and I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of them. The first picture I ever developed — black and white, real film, real darkroom, real developer stains on my fingers — was a photo of ripples in silver-and-black sand, when I was twelve years old. It was gorgeous, and unfortunately lost in one of my many moves, sometime in my teenage years. I’ve been trying to take another one as nice since then, with rather incosnsitent results.
These in particular all came from a couple of trips I made to the Monterey/Carmel/Big Sur area. They might be worth clicking on: there’s a lot of detail there that you can’t see from the smaller images.
It just depends on the sand and the lighting how marked wave-marks can get.
There are rather a lot of different colors of sand around Monterey.
The patterns are often quite light, hard to see.
Sometimes the seaweed makes interesting patterns too.
Looks like a tropical beach, doesn’t it? Until you realize those trees are only a few inches tall…