Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach is my kind of place.  I spent a lot of my formative pre-college days listening to the pounding waves against the cliffs and enjoying the distance from the hippies and crowds of OB proper.  Usually out on the cliffs you have the company of a few joggers, a few more seagulls, and a lot of wind.  It’s just a nice place to be.

If you’re a property owner, however, I’d be a little more worried.  The cliffs are always eroding, sometimes in a spectacular way, and I wouldn’t want my house right across the street.  They put up these little fences around areas of particular danger, and I thought the sharp man-made lines just seemed so out of place in all the rounded nature around it.  I like the lines in this picture, and it’s one of the few that makes me feel ok breaking the rule of thirds.  Maybe even more than in this one.  I think that because there is one man-made object in the whole frame, it makes sense to sort of hide it in plain sight.  It lets nature stay balanced all around.  I think it would have looked sort of funny anywhere else.

Update 2009/11/19/16:25:

Oh yeah… one more thing I didn’t mention above.  I threw a little vignette on this picture.  I don’t use this a ton and when I do, it’s mostly for portraiture.  I tried to keep it pretty subtle too, but I think it works well here for the same reason it does in portraiture – you’re bringing all the eyes into the middle and you don’t want people drifting out the sides.  Just thought I’d mention it!