When we walked the paths at Willow Lake during our end of February snowstorm, we were amazed at how saturated the color of the rocks was in the diffused light and falling snow. Here is the view as we walked our usual path through the rocks toward the lake. Not quite Sedona- but still beautiful!
I decided that I should to go out to take snowy pictures when it is actually snowing if I wanted to capture the diffused light and soft palette that I like so much (and miss in Arizona). So Lonnie and I drove to Watson Lake for today’s photo and then had a great time trudging around in the snow at Willow Lake until the snowflakes stopped. Yes, I got a few shots that were blurred by falling snow, but I got a lot of keepers too. And within a couple hours most of the snow was gone.
It snowed yesterday- and it was beautiful!
I think these will be my last surfing photos- but no promises!
These shots are from the second day of shooting- and I didn’t have a good spot on the pier. So no closeups- both of these are cropped.
I was going through shots from last year’s surfing competition at Huntington Beach and found more blogworthy photos. Here’s a view of the crowd. Notice the photographer wading in the surf with her big lens! How fun that would have been (I was on a pier without my big lens).
Newport Beach scene in black and white.
While in Southern California a couple weeks ago, we went with our son and his wife to visit the Nixon Presidential Library. I loved it- and I am a Democrat. I had never been to a presidential library before and was very impressed by the quality of the displays and how balanced was the portrayal of this controversial president. I grew up in a Republican family in a time when we (well, most of us) still trusted the government and believed that things were only going to get better and better. I remember how devastated my parents, particularly my mother, were by the events of Watergate. At the time of Nixon’s resignation I was hugely pregnant with our first child and had been glued to the television during the hearings. It was fascinating to see the artifacts of Nixon’s childhood and presidency- AND the Watergate scandal.
The photo taken above is outside Nixon’s childhood home; it was closed while we were there because of a wedding.
It’s hard to find a spot without palm trees in Southern California. Even this somewhat minimalist shot includes the ubiquitous palm.
Yes indeed! Another bit of the beach scene from our last trip to Newport-
The light shining through the pine needles was what caused me to snap this photo; it looks like fall, but was just golden light.
A peaceful scene from Lynx Lake
Newport Beach scene
Looking down at an abstract in the sand. . .
As we were leaving the beach, I couldn’t help but notice a little beach house that was dwarfed by its newer, more modern neighbors. It brought to mind a book I used to read to my first graders every year- The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton about a small country house sitting all by itself that over the years became engulfed by the city growing up around it. I wondered if something like that had happened here.
The little beach house was so shaded by its neighbors that I had to do a lot of camera work and post-processing to even get it to be visible- take 3 bracketed images, combine into an HDR and do some dodging after that. I started to see it as an illustration, so used Topaz Simplify to create this new look. One of our assignments in class is a book cover- so now I’m saving this image to possibly bring later on in case I can’t come up with another idea for a book cover.
Wonder what the title could be?
FYI- here is the middle exposure of the three bracketed images:
Now I have to come up with another photo for next week’s class!
melinda anderson photography 