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Death Valley sunset

Bad water sunset.

Later, side-lit with a Protomachines LED8 flashlight held close to the ground.

Mare Island Night Photography

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to join Tim Baskerville's Nocturnes group to do some night photography on Mare Island, California.

Mare Island at night has few really dark places: there are many streets lights and a lot of illuminated work going on at the docks. This is good in a way, as the lights can provide interesting compositions. You can also see what you're doing. Unfortunately also it means the moonlight is overwhelmed in many places. Well, you work with what you've got.

Here are a few shots. Lit by moonlight, artificial work lights and the odd red gelled flashlight.

Alabama Hills California

From the last night of a recent trip. The first with the new Sony A7RII camera.

There is a lot of trial and error with night photography: this was the 26th attempt to get the shot.

Capitola

I drove down to Capitola, California for a couple of days. Rented a Sony A7 R II to see if it might be worth upgrading. Here is a picture of the colorful buildings by the beach - actually the Capitola Venetian Hotel:

Maybe I'll post some comparisons of the sony versus the Olympus. The Sony certainly had more dynamic range: when I lifted shadows the results were much less noisy. Can't really see the difference on this shot though.

California Waterfalls

Although the California drought is still with us, the rains a couple of weeks ago did open up the waterfalls for a bit. Last weekend I went on a couple of hikes, the first was to the Arroyo San Jose Falls which despite its name is in Novato, not San Jose:

A longer hike (about a mile, with a 300 foot plus elevation) was to the falls at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park:

Go see them before they dry up again.

Merry Christmas

Speaks for itself.

Sunrise Over the Arctic Circle

The flight from London took off at 12.30 pm in sunlight and landed in San Fransisco 3.30 pm the same day, in sunlight. And yet we flew through two hours or so of night. We must have flown north of the great circle route into the arctic circle. I've never flown this route in December before so never noticed. The morning light lit up the insides of the engines in such a way that I had to capture it, even if I only had an iPhone camera with me.

Quite a bit of noise reduction applied in Lightroom.

Sonoma Winery turned Green

After a year or more of drought, we get some rain. Everything turned almost overnight from brown to this vivid green color.

Bowling Ball Beach

I visited Bowling Ball Beach back in September. As I learned, you can only really see the "bowling balls" at low tide. But to get good pictures on this west facing beach you really need to be there at sunset. (Or perhaps at night.) I'll know better next time. I had written off the pictures, but last week I decided to give them another try. It turns out that a monochrome conversion gives it an interesting look even though it's shot into the sun.

Someone told me it looks like a bunch of stone headed men slowly rising from the water. 

(Conversion with Silver Efex Pro2 using a slight selenium tone.)

Yosemite

I finally got to go to Yosemite. I'm ashamed to admit it's my first time, although I have lived in the Bay Area since 1995. Here are a couple of the photos. The rest can be found on my main site under Yosemite.

Cactus Flowers

I noticed five flower buds on the cactus in my yard. Just buds, no flowers, for days. Then at 10am last Sunday I noticed one of the flowers had bloomed, so I went out at took a few shots. But the better light was going to be in the evening when the setting sun would light up the flower from the front, so I decided I'd take more shots later that day. When I arrived home at 4pm it had closed up though, never to be seen again. Moral: shoot now, don't wait.

I wonder if the others didn't bloom during the week when I was work. I'll never know - they've all gone now.

Salt Point State Park

Interesting Tafoni details:

Point Reyes Lighthouse and Inverness Shipwreck Again

A day trip to Point Reyes Lighthouse to see if I could walk up the steps (equivalent to a 30 story building) afterwards without stopping. It turns out I could - just. As usual there was a lot of fog at the point, but I managed to capture a little bit of blue.

On the way back I stopped to get another shot of the boat wreck at Inverness that I shot 18 months ago. This time the tide was out so I was able to get closer to the boat.

Sunflowers

I drove up to Yolo County California, the farming areas between Davis and Woodland, where I had been told I would find fields of sunflowers. Normally you would find fields of sunflowers, but this year there is a drought. I actually saw field after field of browned, dried up, sorry looking sunflower failures. The ground was dried up clay as hard as concrete. This is the reality of the drought for the farmers in this part of California - dead fields and millions of lost cash crop dollars. Very sad.

After about an hour, and half a dozen such fields, I decided to give up and come home. Just as I was about to turn onto the highway, I saw this field of yellow to my left. This farmer had irrigation. What a difference water makes.

The Eye of Sauron

From Lord of the Rings:

Actually it's just the cat. Looks pretty evil though.Taken with the Olympus 45mm F1.8 attached to FOTGA macro extension tubes.

Mono Lake / Eastern Sierra

On my way to Death Valley I stopped one night at Mono Lake. Here are a couple shot at dawn, using the the Lee big stopper to slow the exposure. 

The filter lets through 1/1000 of the light allowing for the ten second exposures I used here. It also gives a blue cast, most of which can be removed in post if you shoot raw. I left some of it in though as I like the look.

This one was shot on the route to DV. It's from where the 136 meets the 395. That's Mount Whitney beyond the trees.

Death Valley #2

Three more from my Death Valley trip. First, Badwater Basin:

The Mesquite Sand Dunes just before sunset:

 Zabrinski Point at sunrise. This is known as "The Manifold" for obvious reasons:

See the rest of my Death Valley Pictures.

Death Valley #1 - Cottonball Basin Sunrise

I just got back from a three day trip to Death Valley in California (with a one night layover at Mono Lake). Four mornings of getting up at 5am went surprisingly quickly. With over 500 photos and spectacular scenery it's almost hard to know where to start, so I'm just going to post a few at a time from each location. These were sunrise shots at the Cottonball Basin.

Experimenting With The Big Stopper

Lee's 10 stop "big stopper" filter allowed me to photograph the above in broad daylight with a five second exposure time. This exposure time smooths out the motion in the water, giving it a misty effect. Shot at China Camp State Park, San Rafael.