We've been having unseasonably warm and clear weather here in Southern California the last few weeks... clear blue skies every day, no recent snow and therefore nothing much of interest to shoot up here in the mountains. My work comes to a complete stop between Christmas and New Year's anyway, so I opened the gallery for a few days during the week, but that got really slow also around mid week and I decided to take Thursday off and go exploring for some new shooting locations.
Using Google Earth (my favorite scouting tool), I noticed this area about 50 miles from where I live that I have never heard of before and it looked like a decent possibility to be the kind of place that I enjoy to shoot, so I decided to take little drive down to the flatlands and check it out. It was the one day of the whole week that I thought I saw a hint of some clouds in the sky, or honestly, I probably wouldn't have bothered to even take a camera with me.
I didn't really expect to do any serious work.. I would have been happy just to look around, take some reference shots and come back at a better time, but the light and sky actually came together nicely in the late afternoon, the place was almost totally deserted (of people, but LOTS of birds), the weather was a pleasant 80°(!) and being winter, there were no bugs, which I suspect are unbearable during the warmer season, seeing as this is a partly natural, partly man-made wetland area...
I ended up staying and working until well after sunset and to my surprise managed to produce some pretty good stuff. Definitely a worthwhile find.. if I was just passing by the area and didn't know about it beforehand, there is no way I would ever spot it from the main roads. Nice that there was a still a Fall-ish feel to the place this late in the season, I found quite a bit of color still in the trees as you can see. And, it's definitely a bird watcher's paradise. For those of you in the SoCal area, the San Jacinto Wildlife Area is just NW of Hemet, next to Lake Perris in the town of Lakeview.
BTW, Happy New Year to all the great people who stop by here throughout the year and especially those regulars who always take time to comment.
I made quite a few nice additions to my waterfall collection while up in the Olympic Peninsula. Without checking my notes (there were so many), I recall that this one is called Merryman Falls... one of quite a few found around the Lake Quinault area. My point of interest here was not so much about the falls itself, but the crazy lushness and detail of the rainforest in the surrounding scene.
Getting back to the Olympic Peninsula for a few more:
This is one of the best known falls in the area. I was kind of disappointed with the light after hiking up here... even though the forest cover was quite heavy, the blue sky and bright sun were enough to spoil the colors for me at the time we were here.. ideally, it would be a more typical rainy, wet and foggy day which would create the proper atmosphere and color.. but you have to deal with it when you only have one chance. So, in this case, a monochrome approach to the scene still shows off the falls and the textures of the forest while eliminating the harsh mid-day colors. If you check the expanded view carefully, you can just make out a guy standing on the bridge, for a sense of scale. The water splits into 3 streams as you can see, then flows down through the gorge under the bridge. Amazing that they are flowing this fast, even in the "dry" season.
Although you hardly see it anymore, scenery like this in beautiful, rich black and white (by Paul Caponigro) were exactly what got me interested in photography in the first place, more than 35 years ago....
Today's Sky Watch is another interpretation of the scene in my previous post. A good example, I think, of how extremely different the same thing can look from different points of view (not just in photography, I might add:) This one was shot from exactly the same spot and at the same time, but this time directly into the sun and with a short telephoto lens to bring the clouds and ridge closer together. Shooting at the sun (with my hand extended as a shade) caught these beautiful, fiery highlights on the fast moving wisps of cloud rushing across the scene just below the ridge.
Visit the SkyWatch home page each weekend for more great skies from all over the world.
