raleighnet.org

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.

Work sent me on a 3-day cruise down to Ensenada. I’m not really a “cruise person”, but it was fun and a change of scenery. I know it’s cliche, but I’m probably a good five pounds heavier now. I’m hoping that most of that is just photo weight.

It was supposed to rain today, but it turned out to be a beautiful day. I headed down to the El Dorado Nature Center to take a few photos and enjoy the day.

I drove up to just north of Glendale to the San Gabriel mountains to do a very lovely hike to Switzer Falls. My legs are a bit shot, and my toes hurt, but it was still a very nice hike. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the lens I thought I had on my camera. I just wanted to deal with carrying one, and I didn’t realize my 50 mm lens was still on the camera. That’s a great lens, but it’s not nearly wide enough for some of the vistas I saw. Still, you can see a few of the Switzer Falls Photos that I was able to get.

I went to the Getty Villa on Saturday. I took some photos while I was there.

I took a drive up to Santa Barbara to check out their Monarch Butterfly Preserve. It’s kind of an interesting place. There were a lot of butterflies, but I was actually expecting more for some reason. More variety and just more butterflies flying around. It was nice though, and certainly worth checking out. There was a great little beach within walking distance, so I spent most of my time strolling along that. Of course, I have photos.

I’ve been meaning to get back downtown with my camera for a while now. Today, I finally went.

I’m not exactly thrilled with these photos. They don’t really capture the flavor of everything I saw today. Most of the really interesting things were inside, and there wasn’t enough light, or there was too much backlight coming through windows to really do those locations justice.

Westchester does this small-town type of parade on the 4th. I went, I celebrated, I took a bunch of parade pictures.

Since I still had some time off, I checked on visiting the Getty Villa. It just reopened, so you have to get reservations to visit. The rest of the month was full, but I got lucky and was able to get in yesterday.

I think I like the Villa even better than the new Getty Museum. You don’t get the same views of the city, and it’s a little smaller, but the gardens are a lot more pleasant.

Here are Photos.

I had some time off from work, so I took a quick trip North to California’s Central Coast Area (Morro Bay, Cayucos, Hearst Castle, Cambria, Big Sur, Carmel-By-the-Sea, and Monterey) (photos). Then, I cut over to Yosemite National Park (photos).

It was a nice and relaxing trip. I hadn’t really been to either part of California before, so it was great seeing some of the most beautiful scenery in the country.

The coastal areas were fogged in most of the time. That was a bit of a drag since my main mission was to take some interesting photographs, and I don’t know how to photograph fog well. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels sort of mysterious and magical, but it creates this diffused light that I just don’t know how to deal with in photographs. Everything always seems to come out gray and flat and lifeless.

Hearst Castle is amazing (and thankfully the elevation put it above the fog). You can’t use flash though — even outside, so that presented some photographic challenges of its own. I went on two tours, but I didn’t even come close to capturing that place. I’ll have to go and try again sometime. It really is impressive.

Yosemite is a spectacular place. The views are unbelievable. It had its own lighting challenges though, which left the sky blown out compared to the shaded areas under the tree canopy. I tried to use fill flash where I could, but given that the area I was trying to fill was so vast, there was no way my little onboard flash could light it. The bigger problem is that so many photos ended up looking the same. I took several huge capacity cards worth of photos, but they ended up being basically the same shot. I blame my eye. It should be easy to find variety in that setting, but I kept finding my attention pulled to the big, stunning vistas.