Day Six: Mountain Landscapes

Specifically, this post looks at some photos taken of Mount Rainier and the surrounding mountain landscape.

For those unfamiliar, Mount Rainier is really one of Washington's spectacular sights, rising to over 14,400 feet of volcanic awesome with little comparable terrain around it (winning the coveted Most Topographically Prominent in the Contiguous United States award).  The mountain itself is covered in a series of 26 glaciers, and has many excellent hiking and photography opportunities.

Below, you can find a series of landscape photos I took on a trip last summer to the mountain.  There are plenty of nice flower and wildlife shots as well, but that will have to wait for a separate post.

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 200, f/10, 1/400

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 200, f/13, 1/80

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/320

Sony Alpha 200, 75 mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/500

Sony Alpha 200, 75 mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/400

Day Five: The San Diego County Fair

County fairs can be a real treat to photograph...Interesting people, extravagant food, flashy lights, and...pig races?

Last summer I took a late afternoon/evening trip to the San Diego County Fair, located at the beautiful Del Mar Fairgrounds.

Sony Alpha 200, 50 mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/500

And as hinted above, they had a great pig racing event.  I was quite unprepared for this, so this year I will be sure to bring my a-game so I can get some really great action shots of this intriguing event.

Sony Alpha 200, 75 mm, ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/200

The best part of photographing the fair, to me, is all the great colors and lights that you see after dark.  It really is a treat to see them all in person and presents a great challenge to try to find ways to capture and share that with others.

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/40

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/40

Sony Alpha 200, 28 mm, ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/40

I'm certainly excited to use my lessons learned last year for this years fair.

Question for the audience:

What is your favorite thing to see at the fair?  If you could photograph one thing to capture your thoughts on the fair, what would it be?  Feel free to write in the comments below!

Day Four: Ocean Beach

Took a little walk around Ocean Beach this afternoon after lunch with Jackie.  For those not familiar with the San Diego area, Ocean Beach is a beachfront neighborhood near Point Loma and Sunset Cliffs, a great vantage point for looking out at the Pacific Ocean.

Sony Alpha 77, 28 mm, ISO 100, f/11, 1/25

Sony Alpha 77, 28 mm, ISO 100, f/11, 1/25

Ocean Beach is also home to many good spots for food, shopping (especially antiques), and a generally quirky and fun vibe.

Sony Alpha 77, 75 mm, ISO 320, f/10, 1/100

Sony Alpha 77, 28 mm, ISO 400, f/8.0, 1/25

Beyond cool buildings and general sights, one thing you can always count on is seeing some cool old cars.  On this particular trip, I managed to see two gems.  See more after the jump!

Day Three: Repurposed for Awesome

Earlier this week I was working on making a flower arrangement.  One aspect of this was a set of Oriental Lily's which was still pre-bloom (to give some longevity to the interesting aspects of the arrangement).  Unfortunately, one of the pods was barely attached and fell off when I began putting the arrangement together!  It seemed like such a waste to just throw it away though, because I knew it would bloom into such a beautiful flower...

When I was in high school, I took a course on floral design at Sno-Isle Technical Skill Center (taught by Gary McLaughlin), which was really one of the cooler classes I've ever taken, teaching a wide variety of floral techniques, among which was the art of Ikebana.  I still have a couple Kenzan (a heavy metal base supporting many sharp metal needles for supporting design elements of certain Ikebana arrangements) lying around from back then, and every once in a while I try to think of some way of utilizing them.

Image from the California Academy.

Though it wouldn't make a particularly great Ikebana arrangement, the Kenzan was a perfect way to support the broken pod long enough to get to enjoy the bloom!

Last night it actually bloomed!  See some photos of this after the jump:

Day Two: Joshua Tree

Last spring, Jackie and I went to Joshua Tree National Park for a camping trip.  Our plan was mostly to take a great opportunity to get some great landscape shots in spring time before the weather became unbearable, and to have a nice camping night in the desert.  Based on reviews online, we decided that Jumbo Rocks (see below) was going to be our goal camping spot, due to it's central location for some of the hikes we wanted to do, and it's middle proximity to both the Cholla Cactus gardens (our goal for morning sunrise photos) and Keys View (our goal for evening sunset photos).

Inset map of Joshua Tree campsites and hikes

Now, the exact weekend we made our way out to the desert was one of the Free Entrance Days, which would seem like it would be very careful planning on our parts, so the fact that we did not discover this until the day before we left bespeaks highly of my foresight in assembling trips...Undeterred, we made our way out early on Saturday, certain that at least one of the campsites, even the less desirable ones, would have space.  And we were correct!  Unfortunately, it was way on the other side of the park at the Cottonwood Spring campsite (not included in the map above because it is way on the other side of the park), a good hour drive away from where we wanted to be for all our plans...

Fortuitously, at the visitors center we learned that at Joshua Tree there are overnight parking areas that allow for visitors to backpack and camp in backcountry locations!  And double fortuitously, it was still early enough in the year and cold enough at night that we didn't have to worry about running into any of these guys!

From the NPS website.  Not from me.  Thank god.
Also from the NPS website: "mates in fall; litter size is 500 to 1000 (!);
females may life 20 years or more; males may be eaten during mating."  Ew.

So we hung around and checked out the sites, found an excellent camping spot backcountry (as indicated by the clear presence of many other guests with similar ideas), and had a very nice idyllic little trip!

For those of you who haven't been out that way and are in the area, I would highly recommend it for all the amazing sights; you can see a small sampling of some of my highlights after the jump.

And for those who have an aversion to sharing bedspace with spiders, plan accordingly.

Day one: Getting back into this thing

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So it occurred to me today that I hadn't made any updates of any sort in quite a while (13 months, to be exact).

Well, I'm going to go about fixing that now.  Starting today, I will try to make one post on here every day for the next month.  Be it gaming, baseball, movie thoughts, photos, or something else, there will be content here at least once a day.

Let's go:

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Day One:  Recent(ish) Zoo Photos

These have been posted in other locations of late, but I figured this would be a nice easy way to get into this again.  See them after the jump!