Just a Trickle

Went out to see if I could scout up some new locations here in my own area last weekend. I expected all the streams to be bone dry, so was surprised to find a little bit of flow still going on in a few spots. Very, very dry again this winter.. normally this would be a pretty good little waterfall at this time of year. On the one hand, it's nice that it has been so warm, but here's hoping for some snow, or at least rain, before the season ends. 

Foggy Forest

Nothing quite like a misty, foggy Sunday afternoon out in the 6000' elevation forest around my house. Certainly no worries about anyone popping into my shots accidentally (well, maybe a deer, but rare to see them during the day). 

Peace and Light

Driving home through Garner Valley at the end of the day a couple of weekends ago.  Hard to tell from this, but the hills just behind the fore-most line of hills on the right, is where the Mountain fire tore through the area on the first day, then devastated much of the backcountry way up into the mountains, all the while threatening to destroy the whole town where we live. Only days of hard work by hundreds of firefighters and some amazing luck with the weather got it under control.  Here is what it looked like last summer. We're having a very warm and dry winter, with an historic drought in most of the state, so might be a long and mean fire season coming up this year.

How hot was it? It was so hot....

... last week that even the local squirrels were just too gassed to move!  Actually, I kind of felt the same way:) Living in the forest at 6000 ft. elevation normally protects us from really excessive heat, but a few times per year, seems like the mercury travels into the mid-90's, even here. It was close to 100° just below us in the main part of town, at 5000 ft.  Of course we can't complain too much, since down in the desert not that far from here, they are routinely around 110° this time of year and were toying with 120° last week. We drove down there one afternoon and wow.. takes your breath away if you're not used to it. At least we cool off nicely at night, where they don't so much.
In the summer, I always leave a pan of water out for the local critters, because there is no natural water to be found for quite a distance around where we live, and they seem to really appreciate it.. more than food I think.  Guess this guy was deciding if he had the energy to get down to the ground for a cool drink.
Yes, I know... I haven't been updating posts here much recently.. I have quite a bit of deferred maintenance work to catch up on the house and yard this summer,  and then we had a rather large and unexpected vet bill that postponed our plan for a July road trip to Arizona and Utah, so I just haven't had the opportunity to get out and shoot much new work.  In the meantime, I've got plenty of backlogged stuff to process and print anyway, so no hurry!

Strawberry Creek Gorge

A.K.A. locally as "The Grotto".
This is one of those "right in my back yard, but missed it" locations.  Strawberry Creek emerges out of the ground high up on Mt. San Jacinto and then winds its way down gently all through the village of Idyllwild. I know the area pretty well by now, but there is one section of town that I haven't explored, because it is occupied by the large campus of Idyllwild Arts prep school ( a well known private high school that teaches performing arts, music and visual art at a very high level to talented kids from all over the world).
As it turns out, right behind the school property is where the creek exits town on its way down to the flatlands far below, and also where it enters a large, deep and steep gorge.  Quite impressive... and the perfect place to spend hours enjoying the stream and the granite formations that have been carved into smooth, sweeping shapes over thousands of years by the flowing water.  
Right now, in the midst of the dry season, the stream is barely trickling through here, but there are still some small pools of cool water to be seen and the lack of flow makes it easier and safer to wander around, I'm sure.  Don't know how I just now found about this.. apparently it's well known by the long-time locals and, of course, the students at the school. It's supposed to be off-limits to them because of the danger, but what kid could resist, when it's right there, right?
I recently took one exploratory hike just to find it, and then the other day, went back to spend an hour or two doing some quick abstract studies.  What a great location... hundreds of potential subjects all in a contained area... and if you go at the right time, you won't be bothered by anybody.  This image and a few to come, were done in the mid-day summer sun, so not really ideal conditions... but by thinking in monochrome, which adds to the abstraction, I can usually make a few shots work.

Backtracking

A few posts back, I wrote about this incredible old manzanita that I came across while hiking several months ago; at the time, I just took a few quick, hand held shots of it in the existing harsh light and then noted the location so that I could go back and do it properly under better conditions.  So, here is the result of my recent return.. I think everyone would agree that it is quite an improvement when done under the softer light of a partly cloudy day and with more thought given to how to handle the subject..
Nature can be notoriously uncooperative, often it seems especially so when you take time to travel hundreds of miles just to photograph a spot and don't have the luxury of simply going back anytime… that's when you really have to be flexible and try to adapt to the existing conditions, whatever they may be.  In that situation, I've been lucky at times and frustrated at others.. but always try to consider it part of the fun and the challenge. Since this one was local, I was able to go back at an opportune time and work as long as I wanted, so I now have several print-worthy shots in the can, and I think I will cross this one off my "to do" list:)

Dark Meets Light

Same day, same storm as seen in my previous post. Summer-like weather ever since. This was the best spot I could find to capture these great heavy clouds against the fresh white snow.
The last couple of years, we've had one last bit of snow around Mother's Day, so we'll see what happens this year.  All I know for sure is that we will NOT be planting the vegetable garden before June.. we made the mistake of putting the veggies in in May last year, and ended up starting all over again in June, because of a week of below-freezing nights that killed almost everything.

Spring Snow

It's been a really unusual winter here in the San Jacinto Mountains.. the real winter months were mostly warm and dry; now that it's spring, we've had several pretty good snow storms.  I usually don't expect to shoot scenes like this in mid-April, but here you go, this one is from last Saturday.  Now, it's back into the 70° range and the snow is already gone... go figure. This, and a couple more from the same day, will probably be my last opportunity for snow scenes this year, but that's o.k., because I am actually quite happy with a few from this day.

Sky Watch: Sea of Clouds, II

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.

A Sea of Clouds

An interesting part of living at 6000' elevation is that the weather sometimes approaches from BELOW, rather than above, as you might normally expect. San Jacinto is a nearly 11,000' mountain island, surrounded by desert on the east and rolling, semi-arid hill country to the west.  Especially as we get into winter, that can create some spectacular effects.  Driving home from town the other day, I noticed this perfect sea of clouds extending as far as the eye could see, from just below where we live... all the way out to the ocean, 100 miles to the west. As soon as I got home, I grabbed a camera and ran up the street to my favorite sunset lookout spot... an outcropping of granite boulders on the side of a ridge just near our house.
I'll have a completely different, and I think more dramatic, interpretation of the scene next.

Long Time, No See...

Yep, I'm still here. And wow, it sure gets easy to put off posting once you get out of the habit of doing it on a regular basis.. before you know it, one or two months have gone by.
My regular commercial work and now,  running the new gallery, are conspiring to keep me from getting outdoors to shoot, but that should change in September, since my wife and I have booked a week-long trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington right after Labor Day... I hope to spend a lot of time photographing the lush, green rain forest and uniquely beautiful beaches up there.  That should certainly generate some interesting new work and will be kind of a fresh subject matter for me, which is always nice.

A couple of weeks ago, my old friend (from art school days, back in the '70's.. a long time!) stopped by here for a few days with his family, while on a north-south tour of California, visiting various family and friends along the way. He teaches art now at a private school in western Massachusetts, where we both grew up, and is a really fine plein-air painter... he works at that a lot during the summers while he is off from teaching. He of course wanted me to show off some of my favorite local scenes so he could take a stab at painting them and on the one session that I hung around while he was working, I couldn't resist to wander up the stream and do some studies with my trusty iPhone while killing time. Of course the quality is not there for any kind of printing, but it's sometimes fun to just shoot carefree with no tripod and no worries about quality... and see what you can see.


Since I don't have any new stuff right now and haven't had the inspiration to dig up and talk about anything already in the can, I thought I'd post a few of these just for a hoot.  All here shot with my phone. Notice the detail in the shadow area of the first one below. The iPhone has a pretty nifty HDR capability built right in; it takes two exposures, then blends them right in-camera and it works quite well... I actually had to tone it down some to make it look natural. I expect most digital cameras will have this feature in the near future.

Making Progress

As suspected, no chance at all to go out and shoot new stuff recently, but our gallery here in Idyllwild is really taking shape, though still some final setup work to do.  Then, we can turn our attention to marketing and promotion... the most important stuff.  We did manage to get the doors open this past holiday weekend and will have an official opening reception in 2 weeks, after we take care of all the details. Meanwhile, some "Before" and "After" pics so that you can see that I've not been just goofing off recently:)
So far, we have gone from this:

To this:

After installing all-new lighting, painting the walls, refinishing the wood and cleaning the tile, we've got a nice little space going, I think. The walls are all mine, (love it!), and then sculptor Norman Deesing has the floor (yes, he is almost an exact double of a certain well known actor:).. We also found a fine collection of classic native-american silver and turquoise jewelry to provide some smaller choices and it complements the larger works beautifully. Join us on Facebook at "Earthlight Gallery", for news and updates.

Probably my next update here will be regarding the grand opening and then I'll hopefully get back to generating some new work...

Foggy Forest Evening

This scene - and a few more similar ones upcoming - have been in my head for literally months now, but obviously it required some very specific conditions: late afternoon light, thick fog, and preferably little or no rain (which makes it very difficult or impossible to shoot, unless you have someone there to hold an umbrella for you).  So, I finally got my opportunity this week and spent a busy hour shooting like crazy out in the foggy, wet forest one early evening after several previous days of rain.  Shooting fog is tricky, because the contrast that you see with your eyes is sometimes so different than what the camera sees; some shots that feel fantastic at the moment don't do anything when you look at them later, but others that didn't seem so dynamic in the field look great when you get to processing them. When you hit it just right, the sense of depth and deep, saturated colors can really work well.  I got a dozen or so pretty good frames in about an hour of work; probably two or three will make it as prints at some point... not a bad day's work.  I have a few more of these in the pipeline.

Winter Oaks with Mistletoe

This is a reference shot (done on my iPhone!) from 2 weekends ago.  Locating new subjects is a never ending job, so when I have a free afternoon and I don't have a specific location in mind to work, I like to drive around checking out new roads, or hike a bit at spots that I normally pass by, just to see what I can see.  Usually it's mid-day and the light is not interesting, or the weather is not right... but I'm not concerned about all that, because I know I can come back at a better time.  If a new spot seems to have potential, I just take some quick reference shots as a kind of visual notebook, or "photographic sketch", if you will.
I was strolling around this clearing and thinking that there was not much of interest here, until the sweet light just before sunset lit up these bare oak trees and the background, making it suddenly magical.  For some reason, the clumps of mistletoe in the trees really make the scene for me... makes them look like they were somehow deliberately decorated.  Kind of wish I had been prepared to shoot it properly, because the combination of clouds and light was so perfect, but I can get to this spot in a few minutes next time the conditions and my time permit... and I'll know what time to be there and exactly where to set up to get what I want.
If you click on the image to look at the expanded version, you'll see that the sky is a little noisy and the detail in the grassy area is not the best, but I have to say the the new iPhone 4's 5mp camera is pretty impressive for what it is, with built-in HDR processing and geo-tagging... and on top of that, it shoots HD video!  I think the detail in the branches of the tree is quite nice, at least for a device that fits easily into your pocket and does about a hundred other useful things besides taking pictures:) 

Sky Watch: Shocking Yellow

An especially vivid horizon on this evening back in mid-December.  I've been trying to explore the numerous forest service roads that wander for miles through the back country around town, most of which I have never been on at all, looking for new and photogenic locations. They are mostly pretty rough even in the dry season, but now after the snow and rain I will have to give it up until spring. I was mainly admiring the granite boulder formations in this particular spot, but as it got late and the sun lit up the clouds on the western horizon, I was fortunate to catch several minutes of spectacular color.
The little speck of reflection in the distance that looks like a puddle, is actually a large reservoir (4.5 miles long by 2 miles wide), 50 miles distant. I'm also nearly 5000' above it here, so we can see a LONG way from any open view point.

Check out the SkyWatch homepage every weekend for more great sky images from all around the world.

SkyWatch: Winter Wonderland and Clearing Storm

I very nearly made the mistake of going out for a walk the other day without any photo gear.. the weather had just barely let up after snowing all day and it was still gray and dark when I left the house. Luckily I relented and grabbed my SLR, because 10 minutes later, the local fog had lifted and I had a few minutes to capture some spectacular light on the dissipating clouds far below.

This was shot from a forestry road that runs around the town just below our house. Someone had amazingly driven their truck up the road earlier, providing me a couple of nice tracks through the deep snow to walk on, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered to hike to this spot.. one of the few nearby that offers a view out through the dense trees to the lower elevations. That's the luck element, I guess.. I have gone out many days looking specifically for light and clouds that look like this, and come up empty, then this day unexpectedly, it's right there and I just had to be ready.

That is actually not the sun you see shining THROUGH the cloud, but a bright reflection ON the cloud, as the sun in this scene was way off to the left and just a few minutes from setting... the resulting touch of orange/yellow against the soft blues is really important to the scene, don't you think? A painter would know that and simply add it in; for a photographer it's a more elusive thing, but that's the fun and the challenge of landscape photography.

Check out the SkyWatch homepage every weekend for more great sky images from all around the world.

Thorn Bush and Fresh Snow

Six inches of fresh snow on Sunday night/Monday morning produced some beautiful winter scenery here on Mt. San Jacinto... at least for a short time.  Around here, it usually doesn't take too long for the snow on the trees to start melting and falling off, so optimal shooting time can be kind of brief after the actual storm clears out...  Huge clumps of snow falling from the trees onto your head, down your neck and all over your camera makes for messy working conditions:)
While walking in the national forest just below our house, the abstraction and contrast of this sharp, thorny bush against the soft fresh-fallen powder caught my eye.

Going with the Flow

Last week was 6 straight days of pouring rain here in the mountains of southern California ...a grand total of 11" from Thursday through Wednesday. Although I like snow, I'm kind of glad that this storm was a warm one and we missed out on the white stuff (at least at this elevation)... otherwise it would have been a truly epic snow storm and would have made life pretty difficult around here for a while.
All that rain (and snow on the high peaks) is now flowing down the mountain and making for some really pretty and refreshing scenes along the rivers and creeks that were showing barely a trickle just a couple of weeks ago. It's really fun to explore up here with waterfall after waterfall....  the roar of the water acts like white noise, blocking out the rest of the world so you can really concentrate on your work... you just have to remember to think about where your feet are too, while standing on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream:) You can click for a larger view on this one.
I'm planning to be out in Joshua Tree before the end of this week... (actually I have several more nice ones from my last session out there in October that I haven't even shown yet).  The weather is ever-unpredictable around these parts in the winter, so you really do have to "go with the flow" and be willing to change your plans.

Cold Blue Cold

Another manzanita bush; but this one ended up a bit "under the weather":)...
Yeah, it can be uncomfortable to get up early in the morning after a snowy night, or stand around trying to frame and shoot while your hands are freezing, but fresh snow is such a great subject for minimal, stark, white-on-white images. Something I've been wanting to work on for a long time, but just wasn't in the right place.  Cloudy days are ideal, so you have more flexibility of time to work... and, color or monochrome seem to work equally well. This shot looked fine in pure monochrome, but I decided to leave it in color for now; I think it feels right with the cold blue cast in the shadows to emphasize the feeling.
This will be the first winter in many years that I am actually living where it snows, so I am hoping to put together a nice, unified folio of winter images this season.

Water Study: Time Provides Perspective

This image and a color one to come, were both taken over one year ago near our home in the southern California mountain community of Idyllwild. I made about 40 exposures over the course of several hours, working on the waterfall flowing out of a small local lake. (Hard to call it a "waterfall" compared to one like this, but they can't all be epic:) The whole session has been languishing in my "digital negative cabinet" since then. I had looked through the exposures several times and played briefly with a few, but just had it in my mind that there was nothing really worth developing from this session. Something about the quality of light or color of the rocks just wasn't sitting right with me at the time.

As I've talked about before, it very often pays off to go back and rework things after some time has passed.. shots that you think great in the excitement of reviewing them while brand new, can be evaluated more honestly after the attachment we feel to them has faded. Even better, as in this case, you may find something very worthy that you completely overlooked. Just consider that whatever skill level you are currently at, your eye and technique are constantly changing and developing.