By Scott Shephard

I spent about 10 days on the tip of Baja Mexico recently and spent about 1 hour doing serious photography. As our president-to-be might tweet: "So sad! What a loser!" And he'd be right.

Excuses? I spent 8 of those days at an all-inclusive resort and aside from sand, blue skies and palm trees, the most photogenic thing I saw were the tequila sunrises Aurelio, our beach bartender, delivered. And how many photos of tequila sunrises can you take? Answer: you don't take photos of them. You drink them. And, after a couple, who cares about documenting the Mexican resort experience?

But on one morning Deb and I ventured past the civilization of the resort zone to a stretch of photogenic beach. The southern baja, which juts into the Sea of Cortez, is barren desert which I find amazing, especially at sunrise, when this photo was taken. Here, the Mexican desert comes down to the sea to take a drink.

And why would I turn pure blue sea and sky and warm sandstone boulders into black and white objects? Well, I want you to see texture, not color. After all, when I'm out taking landscape photos, I think, "WWAD?" (What would Ansel do?) Ansel Adams would shoot this scene in black and white because that's all there was in the 1930s. And he was a master in helping us see texture, lines, shapes and shadow and light.

Canon 5DIII 1/180s f/9.5 ISO160 32mm