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I drove up to Santa Barbara and went out on a whale watching boat trip. It was a fun day. Some of the whales got almost within touching distance, and there were hundreds of dolphins swimming and jumping around. It turns out it’s not very easy to photograph whales. You basically just get a bit of gray — and given the cloudy and foggy day, that means that the whale, the water and the sky were all kind of an uninteresting gray. I did what I could though, and you can see a few whale watching photos here.

I had a few hours of light after the whale watching trip, so I stopped in to the Santa Barbara Zoo as well. You can see some zoo pictures here.

By the way, when they tell you that even when it’s cloudy you can still get sunburned… you should totally believe them. I’m terribly red right now.

Yesterday, I went for a hike in Malibu. The Solstice Canyon Loop is an interesting trail to hike. There’s this burnt out old building that you can explore, and plenty of streams and waterfalls. I would have liked to have seen the house before it was burned. It’s sort of tough getting an idea of what it must have been like because it seems like the outside and inside of the house must have been very tightly integrated, sort of like a Frank Lloyd Wright house or something. A tripod would have been very helpful on this hike since it was a little too dark under the canopy for hand held most of the time. Still I managed to make a few pictures of Solstice Canyon.

I’ve been wanting to get down to the San Diego Wild Animal Park for quite a while now, and since I was taking this whole week off to burn some vacation days I was about to lose, today seemed like the perfect day. I did one of their photo safari adventures. That was cool since they drive you right up to the animals. I got licked by a giraffe, and I got to pet a rhino horn.

If I have one complaint it’s that they didn’t take us into any of the predator enclosures. I guess they’re worried about “safety” or something lame like that. Unfortunately, to my eye at least, all of the herd animals kind of look the same. Once you’ve photographed one of them, you’re pretty much done. If I’m going to photograph something, I want to photograph something exciting like one of the apex predators. I don’t want to photograph, well, food. Anyway, you can see some San Diego Wild Animal Park photos here.

I took a drive up to the Exotic Feline Center in Rosamond to make some pictures of cats.

A local photography group has a May assignment to photograph “Spring Flowers”, so I headed up to Huntington Library and Gardens to make some flower photographs.

They were also doing a Shakespeare in the Garden type of thing, along with all of their other attractions, so I made some photos of all of that as well.

Continuing in my ongoing attempts to make a decent photograph of the moon, I headed up to the Griffith Observatory with my camera. I don’t think I’m there yet. These aren’t the moon pictures I’m looking for, but they are getting a little bit closer. There are a few OK ones of downtown Los Angeles at night in there too.

On Saturday, I drove up to the Hollywood Animals Exotic Animal Training School to check out one of their wild animal seminars. There seemed to be quite a lot of waiting around while they shuffled in one animal or another, but it was still pretty interesting. And, since you could get right up on top of some of those animals, I was able to get some OK animal photos.

As long as I was all the way up there already, I also headed over to Vasquez Rocks to photograph some of the interesting geological formations that have been used as backdrops for shows like Star Trek.

Tonight was the full moon, and I headed up to Joshua Tree with the intent of photographing it. Things started out a little bad. Then, they got kind of nice, but boy did they ever end on a massive downer that involved a broken car window and no good pictures of the moon at all.

I had planned to rent a nice long lens for this photo session. There’s a store near me, and when I went in last week, they said that they had a 500 mm lens they could rent me. Unfortunately, when I went in this morning to pick it up, they told me the lens was on consignment, and that it didn’t belong to them, so they couldn’t rent it to me. I didn’t have time to go to any other stores, but I hit the road confident that the 300 mm lens I used last night would at least be serviceable.

I got to Joshua Tree around 2:30. That was by design. I didn’t want to have to kill too much time waiting for the moon rise. I designed poorly, because Joshua Tree is an amazing park, and I really wish I had a lot more time to explore and photograph. I’m going to have to go back there sometime and maybe spend a couple of days really exploring and taking my time with my camera.

I did manage to explore a little though, and you can see some of my photos of Joshua Tree here. An observant viewer will notice a few things about those pictures. First, there are no pictures of the moon. Second, there is a picture of a broken car window and glass all over my backseat.

I drove up to some lookout point type place that offers some amazing vistas. It was also really windy though. I mean like literally almost blow me off the hill windy. And cold — oh my god! I had a winter jacket with me just in case it was cold at night, but I was still frozen solid.

Now, last night, I was having trouble with a light wind shaking my camera when it was on the tripod, so I could only imagine what it would do in this wind. I decided I’d have better luck just steadying the camera on a sign post and hand holding it. I assumed that since the moon is a sunlit object that calls for about a 1/125 of a second shutter speed (assuming ISO 100 and F 16), a little camera shake wouldn’t be that noticeable. But, the shake was VERY noticeable. I should have used the tripod and relocated to another area that was less windy. My initial shots were also VERY under-exposed and none of them were all that well exposed. I’m not sure why that is. I didn’t have that problem last night, but with everything combined, I didn’t get a single usable lunar image.

However, since it was so cold up there, I was jumping in and out of my car to change lenses and try to warm up. Somehow, in the midst of all that jumping and warming and changing, I managed to lock my keys in my car. Oh what tremendous fun that was.

I tried using my pocketknife to force the window down — that didn’t work. I tried asking somebody for a hanger (fortunately, there were people up at the vista point). Nobody had one. I tried using somebody’s cell phone to call for help — no signal. Finally, I tried breaking a small back window so that I could reach in and unlock the door.

I tried that a lot, but those tempered glass windows are freakishly resilient. A rock scratched the window a little, but made no progress in breaking it. I tried scoring the window to no effect. One of the guys up there had a sturdy flashlight that he was willing to use to beat the window. There were sparks, but no breakage. Finally, somebody had a hammer which made quick work of the window.

All in all, that may be the most expensive lunar photograph that I never managed to make. I do want to go back to Joshua Tree though. And, I still need to make a nice picture of the moon one of these months.

I decided that I wanted to make a picture of the full moon (which actually rises tomorrow). However, I wanted to practice on the nearly full moon tonight, so I headed up to Point Dume Beach in Malibu. That’s a really cool beach with all kinds of tidal pools and the interesting rock formations that are part and parcel of Malibu.

I’m not very happy with the moon pictures that I manged to make though. It was really smoggy/hazy. Tomorrow, I’m going to the desert, and I’m hoping I won’t have to contend with smog there. The images also weren’t as clear and sharp as I would have liked. That might be the photographer, but I’m tempted to blame my lens.

The longest lens that I have is a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG APO Macro Telephoto Zoom Lens. It’s a pretty cheap lens, and I guess you get what you pay for. This was the first time I’ve gone shooting with it, and I’m not very happy with the results I got with it. I’m thinking about renting a nicer lens for tomorrow.

Anyway, I have Pictures of Point Dume Beach including a few moon images.

My parents were in town in preparation for boarding a cruise ship. We spent the afternoon exploring San Pedro’s Ports of Call and touring the Queen Mary in Long Beach and of course taking pictures of the whole visit.