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: