Category: Outdoor

Barbed Hosted on Zooomr

I missed a day, it was bound to happen. I caught up today, though. I took this on my way to work. It was late in the morning, but the sun hadn’t hit this spot yet. The field in the background was in full sun with a frosty foreground. It was a nice contrast – frosted white foreground, creek with ice on it, and a brightly lit, green field in the background. All that color and I converted it to black and white.

I haven’t been editing the photos on this blog much, or on zooomr, aside from minor contrast adjustments using Picasa, but this one looked better in black and white. I’ve seen some cool photos that have been edited in Photoshop, so I may experiment a little. My intent was to just post the file from the camera, but sometimes a little correction or enhancement is needed. So far I’ve only used Picasa to make adjustments. Picasa is great. It’s adjustments are pretty rudimentary, but as an organizational tool it is great.
See the geotag and details on Zooomer. Also checkout Skoot’s photos on Zooomr.

Frosted Hosted on Zooomr

Today I was late driving to work, so I took a back road that has less traffic. I dropped into this valley, and noticed a farm house across a frosted field. I quickly pulled over and started shooting. It was early in the morning and everything was still frosty, which I always think looks really pretty in the early morning light. I took a lot of shots, several of which I liked, but this was my wife’s favorite so it makes the blog. You can see a couple of other shots here and here.

I’ve driven through this location dozens of times, and never thought to take pictures. It’s just your average dairy farm, but this morning with the frost and morning light it was transformed. Again, I found a shot in something routine and ordinary. Photography is like that sometimes, at least for me.

I used a polarizing filter on this shot and went for a short depth of field. You can kinda make out the farm house
that caught my eye in the background. I really like the polarizing filter and think it really enhances outdoor pictures. See the exposure details and geotag at zooomr.

Giant Oak Hosted on Zooomr

I took my daughter for a walk in Helen Putnam Regional Park today mainly just to enjoy the weather. Of course I brought my camera and put on the new Hoya Polarizing filter I got last week. I came across this massive, old oak tree that had a lot of huge branches literally growing sideways, touching the ground. It was an amazing tree that I failed to capture adequately.
Anyway, this was a decent shot of one of the branches.You can get a sense of the size of the braches from this shot. I was standing on the ground, looking down the length of the branch. The diameter of the branch was well over a foot. I have several more shots of the tree; if anyone is interested I can do a supplemental post. The tree is amazing. If you can get to Helen Putnam park, it is on the Panoram trail.
Check out the location, details, and higher resolution images at Zooomr.

Bridge and Barbs Hosted on Zooomr

Another cold day here, cold for California at least. There was a bit of a breeze, so the sky was a beautiful clear, blue with no haze. So I took a picture that has very little sky. I drove around at lunch and saw lots of beautiful landscapes, but my landscapes usually don’t come out as well as I’d like, so I didn’t take any wide open shots today. I crossed this bridge on my way back to work, and caught the barbed wire out of the corner of my eye as I drove by. Fortunately no one was behind me when I slammed on the brakes. Something about the wire intrigued me, like the wire had tethered the bridge in place.

There a lot of small, old bridges in the Sonoma farm country that haven’t been rebuilt with modern guard rails and still retain their original cement work. I like the look of the old bridges, more so when they are weathered and aged and have stains or moss on them, as this one does. I’ve driven over a lot of them recently, maybe I’ll take a series of shots of old bridge railings before they’re all replaced with the same metal rails we see everywhere. Even though this bridge railing is pretty simple, it shows that someone thought about aesthetics when they built the bridge. Too much modern construction is utilitarian to an extreme, with no effort put into making structures look nice, even just a little bit. The old bridges fit the landscape, maybe just because the are windworn and aged, like the land around them. Anyway, I like seeing the old structures and wish new ones had even a small amount of charm.

Visit the Zooomr page for location and shot info.

Cold Wind Hosted on Zooomr

This is the first photo in my “photo a day” experiment. I only took about six pictures today, this is the one I liked the best. This picture was taken a couple of miles east of Tomales, CA off Twin Bridge Road. The image at Zooomr is geotagged so you can see where it was taken.
Zooomr also has a higher resolution version and Exif information (including exposure settings). Maybe in future posts I’ll put that info here as well, but for today I’m just
glad I got the site up.