California Travels

Yosemite – Rain, Snow & Sun

May 15, 2011 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

Yosemite National Park, CA

We visited Yosemite only 7 months ago, but decided to visit again since our last trip was marred by bad weather. The high elevation roads were still closed from winter, so we didn’t visit any places we hadn’t seen before. We instead focused our efforts on obtaining photos of the valley from different vantage points, as the weather seemed to be more agreeable than the last time we were here.

Our crazy photo schedule involved waking up for sunrise (6am), exploring the park until the majority of the tourists arrived (around 10am), then we would go take a nap until mid-afternoon and head back out again for hiking and sunsets.

The first day I was determined to get a photo from the Tunnel View vantage point with all the peaks visible, since when we were here in October there was rain and fog. We then decided that we’d wander up to Inspiration Point, which turned out to be 1.3 miles uphill with 18lbs. of camera gear.

The view at Inspiration Point was similar to Tunnel View, of course, but because of the higher elevation the further mountains and Half Dome had nicer proportions against the closer peaks. We spent an hour there relaxing, enjoying the solitude—we saw 2 people going down the trail as we were going up, and that was it for the entire hike. It was surprising not to run into anyone else, especially when Yosemite is so busy usually. Anyway, while we were sitting up on Inspiration Point trying to be inspirational, the sun/clouds moved into the perfect spot to turn Bridalveil Falls into a vivid rainbow of mist. It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was really spectacular.

Inspiration Point - Rainbow Mist

Around then, we decided we wanted to be at Inspiration Point for sunset. This proved to be a dilemma, since sunset was several hours away, but we hadn’t brought anything to kill time up there. We debated our options: going down and coming back up, going down and giving up, staying put and being bored, or… continue walking upwards, then return back down for sunset. We decided the last option was the most appealing, because although it required us to continue walking uphill for another hour or two, it would make the return trip pretty quick.

Yosemite Valley - Sunset

The following morning we woke bright and early for a mediocre sunrise over Half Dome, followed by a morning of waterfalls.

Pohono Bridge & Fern Spring

Pohono Bridge & Fern Spring

Cascade Creek

Cascade Creek

Burned Area near Foresta

Foresta - Burned Area

Gates of the Valley – Valley View

Valley View

After our long day of driving in circles and fighting the crowds (Saturday was significantly busier than Friday), we settled down for an overcast (fail) sunset of the Half Dome before heading back to the hotel for some pretty terrible hamburgers.

The following morning my alarm went off at 4:45am again, but (to Travis’s delight) it was raining outside, so I allowed us to go back to sleep until 7am.

We packed up our bags and checked out, deciding to stop by the park once more to see the Giant Sequoias and leave the park via the South entrance to Fresno. However, once we got outside, we discovered that the rain at our hotel was snow in the park—luckily our rental car had snow tires, they were turning people away. This ruined our passage to Fresno, as the road was closed (we’ll see those Sequoias someday), but it all turned out okay, as we got some really spectacular photos of the valley as the snow cleared off the mountain peaks.

Snowy Yosemite Valley at Tunnel View

Valley View with fresh snow

Storm Clearing off El Capitan

These photos almost made us miss our plane. We ended up cutting it pretty close (and missing our pre-flight In-N-Out), but it’s okay, since we have In-N-Outs in Texas now too! Ha!

Overall we had a great Yosemite weekend—the waterfalls were huge and the weather was decent, plus we managed to get both spring and winter pictures in 3 days. We missed out on the hikes to Vernal Falls and Mirror Lake, and the road to Glacier Point still wasn’t open. Perhaps next time.

Oh! And we also saw a bear!

Muffin the Bear

But no, really—when we were hiking down from Inspiration Point we did actually see a bear. I whipped out my camera to try and take a picture, but Travis decided it was more important for us to stay alive than to take pictures of the bear staring at us, so he shook his walking stick and shouted and scared that ol’ bear away.

This here is Muffin, my adopted bear, since I wasn’t allowed to go pet the real bear *sad face*

Filed Under: America the Beautiful Quarters, California Travels, National Parks

A rare day in L.A.

December 26, 2010 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

Ever since I found out I was moving to Texas I’ve gone on a photo spree taking advantage of my time left in CA to take nice shots of things that I’ve grown up around and take for granted. One of the shots I wanted to get before I left was a nice shot of the L.A. Skyline, which is tricky since you not only need the weather to cooperate, but it usually works best on the 3rd day after a long weekend (less smog) and/or after a rainstorm.

Lucky for me, the day after Christmas happened to have all of these factors rolled up into one — it rained the night before, clearing the air after the long holiday weekend so we got a gorgeous smogfree view of L.A. Note the difference from the same vantage point on an average day in L.A. Crazy.

It was actually looking to be a pretty dull sunset, since the clouds were blocking out the sun, but there was a moment right as the sunset that the pink glow peeked through onto the buildings and mountains. It was only lit for a few minutes, but I took advantage of the moment and took some close-ups of the city as well as a giant panorama so I could see how the pink stretched across the mountains. Usually you can barely see the mountains!

We waited a little longer after sunset to see how the city looked at night, messed around a little bit with intentionally blurry photos (bokeh is fun!) But yea… I look forward to finding new and exciting places to shoot in Texas, although I will miss my quick beach/pier/sunset access whenever the sky looks good. It will be an adventure I’m sure!

Filed Under: California Travels Tagged With: alpenglow, cityscape, l.a. skyline, LA, los angeles, mountains, no smog, skyline, smogless, sunset

Autumn Colors at Yosemite~

October 22, 2010 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

Daytime light trails using a 10-stop ND filter

As a special treat for my birthday we decided to take a weekend journey up to Yosemite and Mono Lake to see what we could do about finding autumn colors in California. The plan was to leave late Thursday and spend Friday and Saturday exploring Yosemite before heading over to Mono Lake Saturday evening for sunsets and sunrises. Unfortunately the weather did not agree.

It was overcast for most of our Yosemite day, and while I was sad I couldn’t take sunset pictures with no sun I was content with my overcast waterfall and valley photos. However, overnight snowfall closed the Tioga Pass the morning we planned to drive it so that effectively ruined our plans to go to Mono Lake (talk about bad timing.)

We decided to head back down to SoCal on Saturday instead of driving around Yosemite to get to Mono Lake. We contemplated stopping by Sequoia or Kings Canyon National Parks, but with questionable weather everywhere we decided we’d try again some other time.

On the bright side, I did get some good use out of my 10 stop neutral density filter I picked up a few weeks ago. Using the filter, my sad tripod, a shutter release and a nifty app on Travis’s iPhone I practiced taking long exposure shots in broad daylight. This allowed for some cool smoothing effects and also helped to remove stray people who insisted on wandering through the waterfalls. My fav shots of the trip were the long exposures light trails down the autumn road and the ones of the lake (before it got all overcast and grey).

Overall it was a good first trip to Yosemite — I’d definitely like to go back sometime, perhaps in the spring when the waterfalls are flowing stronger (although I here it’s far more crowded then). I also need to get a nice shot at the Tunnel View overlook; we didn’t make our way over there until the clouds had settled in and there was no chance of seeing any of the peaks. Maybe next time we’ll actually check the weather in advance or plan to stay a few more days so we have more flexibility.

Filed Under: America the Beautiful Quarters, California Travels, National Parks Tagged With: autumn, light trails, national park, nd110, yosemite

Paso Robles Wine Tasting

August 6, 2009 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

I get a bit lazy with taking pictures when we’re in areas I’ve been before, but I took my camera out while we were wandering Paso Robles and tried to take a few pictures. The vines were much greener and bushier than they were when we went to Napa four months ago. I think I should go back to the vineyards in September/October right before the harvest so I can take nice pictures of the scenery.

We met up with Bryan and Behshad and camped for 2 nights in San Simeon. We visited our old favorite wineries the first day, and then spent the second day checking out unfamiliar wineries off the main road.

Pictures below include a neat view of the marine layer over the ocean while we were up in the hills, a fat greedy campsite squirrel who ate our stale cheerios and sunset from the campground.

Our trip is over now — we’re back in sunny Southern California. It was an awesome 4 months and 5 days on the road, but it’s also great to be back in a familiar area and get back to a normal life. I can finally get around to printing pictures and making albums, and we have a whole bunch of good memories and stories to last us forever. I’ll probably do some wrap-up posts later — I wanted to do a “best of” type list, but Travis wanted to wait until after we officially returned and unwound for a few days.

Filed Under: California Travels, Road Trip 2009 Tagged With: california, paso robles, squirrel, sunset, vineyard, wine country

Bird Obsession and Norcal Wrap-up

April 8, 2009 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

So, Lake Tahoe, is awesome. I’m sure it’s primarily because it’s very nice to get a hotel room with a giant jacuzzi tub for only ~$33 per night, which is cheaper than what we were paying for rent in CA (which is the point of our trip). I enjoyed sleeping on a real bed so much, and I’m excited I have another 2 nights here before we head out to Death Valley.

Today we didn’t really do anything super exciting. We’re staying at one of the casinos here, but I’m not a big gambler, so I won about $10 by better on black twice in roulette, then lost some change pushing buttons on the slot machines, and then I gave up. We had much more fun by getting a card for the arcade at the casino across the street where we found our beloved Buzzy Buzzy game we found at the nickel arcade in Bakersfield. Although it costs a whole 20 cents in Tahoe rather than the 10 cents in Bakersfield, it was fun to play again. My best score in Bakersfield was 19 little bee balls into the honey jar (Travis’ and Bryan’s bests were 22), but in Tahoe I got 37 (Travis’ best here was ~32). We found the balls in this machine were easier to scoop up, but less easy to hit in accidentally. You’ll have to play to see what I’m talking about.

Anyway, other than that, we had some Lake Tahoe photo ops for my camera obsession. I tried to take pictures of snowflakes while it was snowing earlier, but they kept melting. Hoping for snow tomorrow so I can try again. But, since we failed at snowflakes, we wandered to the lake to chase geese and take pictures of mountains.

I haven’t had time to piece together any of the pictures I took today while lazying around Lake Tahoe, such as the scary pretzel eating geese or the sunset attempts of the mountains, so I’ll just post some leftover stuff from our Napa/San Francisco/Berkeley journey, plus my recent obsession with photographing birds.

I’m not sure what it is about the birds… I thinks it’s just that they move so fast it’s just really hard to get decent pictures so I get really excited when I do.

But anyway…

Napa leftovers:

San Francisco and Berkeley — I didn’t like any shots I got of the Golden Gate Bridge, because the weather was fairly poor, but Travis said I wasn’t allowed to not post one.

Driving to Lake Tahoe — before the crazy cold and snow and ice, the rain let up and we saw a weak rainbow off in the distance. I took pictures, but they were all kinda sad. But then — about an hour later as we were passing Sacramento, I saw this beautiful rainbow that was on both sides of the highway (and double rainbow on one side). We only pulled over for a second so I could try to take pictures, so most of my pictures were out of the car window. The photo with the large tree was one I really liked, but was somewhat poor because of shooting out of the car window, so I did some extensive playing in photoshop to make it look cool, although it doesn’t necessarily look real anymore.

So ya, that’s all for now ~ Travy and I are gonna go play more Buzzy Buzzy; he needs to beat my new high score, plus I need about 300 more tickets to get this awesome pink cow stuffed animal. Tahoe pictures to come tomorrow hopefully!

Filed Under: California Travels, Road Trip 2009 Tagged With: berkeley, bird, bridge, california, camping, fire, lake tahoe, napa, nevada, rainbow, san francisco

Norcal Wanderings

April 7, 2009 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

Such a long day.

Today we got up nice and early, packed up the camping supplies, although we tossed the tent. I guess Travis had it since he was 8 years old, and it was getting a bit worn. We’ll get a new one before we camp again later this week.

After we packed up, we said farewell to Bryan and Behshad and started our journey to San Francisco in the rain. We were lucky that the rain decided to hold off until after our 3 days of camping, but I fairly certain we wouldn’t even be able to see the Golden Gate Bridge. However, the rain let up a little bit as we were driving, and we were able to see the bridge, although it was pretty grey and foggy. After that we drove around a little bit, hit up Lombard Street for fun, then headed out to Berkeley.

In Berkeley we sat at the Marina for an hour or so, then went to pizza for an early dinner with one of Travis’ college friends before heading out towards Lake Tahoe. The drive to Tahoe was kinda scary because it was nearly freezing and the roads were dark, windy and wet from earlier. We made it in one piece though, and I’m just so happy to be somewhere with warm showers and a real bed.

I have a lot of photos from Napa, San Francisco, Berkeley and driving to Lake Tahoe (rainbows!) but I need to do more post-production first, so….

This is where I’ll be tonight, and that’s all that really matters right now anyway.

Filed Under: California Travels, Road Trip 2009 Tagged With: california, camping, lake tahoe, napa, nevada

Napa is a nice change from Bakersfield.

April 5, 2009 By Lindsay 2 Comments

No doubt about it, it is infinitely prettier in Napa than it was staring in Bakersfield. We had fun yesterday wandering around the vineyards and a nearby lake. The vineyards themselves aren’t super exciting because all the plants are very small still, but there were a lot of nice wildflowers and other scenery.

I need to take pictures of sheep, but we saw a bunch yesterday and couldn’t find any today on the ride back to Sacramento. It’s okay though, because Travis and I are heading back there tonight for 2 more nights of camping.

As far as the wine tasting goes, there are a ton of wineries in Napa, but I gotta say I prefer the experience in Paso Robles more. Napa has just as many vineyards, but they are all more expensive; like in Paso you can usually taste for free, or if they charge you it’s because you get to keep your wine glass (and it’s only $5-10 anyway). Napa most places seemed to be $10-20, with no free glasses. It was also generally more crowded (although I guess it was a Saturday).

It was still fun though. We went to Sutter Home first right before lunch, which is a brand I recognize from the grocery stores. They gave Leila and I their sweeter wines, which I thought tasted mostly the same (and like juice). I guess I’m not a big fan of white zinfandel, white cabernet sauvignon, and white merlot. I wasn’t even aware that all those wines came in “white” form (I had only heard of white zinfandel prior). I guess it has to do with grape skins in the fermentation process or something. The guy explained it to another group there, but I couldn’t hear very well.

After that we found a vineyard that did Saturday BBQs, so we all got some tasty sandwiches and ribs. I guess they did free wine tasting there, but we didn’t try any because it was ridiculously crowded inside and out. They did have an awesome display of cheese though. I didn’t get any of that either.

After that we found a lake, found some wineries, went to the grocery store… It was pretty fun overall; got better later in the day once the people seemed to stop charging us for tasting fees if we were nice to them.

Some pictures from vineyards, driving, hiking and lake.

Abandoned looking cabin Leila and I found while wandering

Heading back to Napa now for some more camping fun!

Filed Under: California Travels, Road Trip 2009 Tagged With: california, camping, lake, napa, panorama, wine country

Essense of Bakersfield

April 2, 2009 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

I decided at some point that my only real goal in terms of photography is to take one cool shot that I really like in each place I stay for a prolonged period of time. This was somewhat of an issue for Bakersfield though, because everything here is just kinda dry with lots of oil rigs and dead stuff.

The picture I liked the most was a panorama of a railroad bridge while standing in a “river” just before sunset (the river was dry). It’s stitched together from 13 vertically-oriented shots. I had some fun fooling around with this image, because I liked the high-contrast desaturated look, whereas Travis wanted me to try for a post-apocalyptic look (which I’m not sure I got).

#1 – High-Contrast Desaturated

#2 – “Post-Apocalyptic”

#3 – Original (very little post-production)

I’m not sure which one I prefer (either #1 or #3 for me), but so far I think this image is the most interesting of my Bakersfield bunch.

Couple extra shots that turned out okay:

Filed Under: California Travels, Road Trip 2009 Tagged With: bakersfield, california, hdr, panorama, railroad, sunset

Testing Sunset Pictures Display

March 26, 2009 By Lindsay Leave a Comment

So the POD arrived today, we can finally start moving things out of our apartment. I guess I need to start packing soon, haha.

I’m getting really excited for leaving soon — even though I know there’s a ton of things to do in the next week. I have to clean-up + pack, probably purchase a few necessities for the trip, go to work for a few more hours (solely to fill out my timesheet and get my favorite Diedrich coffee cup if nothing else), and finish getting excited and ready to travel. I also need to prep my laptop for the trip (need to install all my photo editing programs).

Other than that — still not much to report; we are in the preparation stage, but we’re at the slightly more stressful point where the past few weeks of procrastination is really going to kick us in the butt this weekend. Oh well ~ such is life.

I’ve spent my last few weeks in Orange County before the trip trying to take pictures on the way too and from work, particularly when there are sunsets with clouds (clouds make the sunsets infinitely cooler). So here are a few favorites from recently: