Joy, every time I visit the Monterey Peninsula I'm blown away by the colors, as I have been for the past 50 years. The waters alone wherever you look have astonishing color. The non-native ice plant that covers the CA coastline has a truly varied and vivid color range, from bright yellow-green, through shades of green, into orange, red and rust and dusty brown, and are dotted with flowers in white, yellow and into the vivid purple spectrum. The rocks - sometimes sedimentary sandstone, sometimes igneous volcanic - are striated horizontally with bands of color and shaded interestingly vertically due to the effects of erosion and the planes of light playing across or down on them. In that area the transparency of the water shows off the varied colors of the kelp and seaweed. Sand can range from dark brown to brilliant warm white. If I'm sounding poetic, it's because the views are indeed lyrical. The challenge is to capture all that.
