A bit of spring color for you from the Filoli Gardens south of San Francisco:
No great scene of social importance, just a wonderful selection of complementary colors by the gardens’ designers…
Ready to bloom
Category Archives: Flora
Just waiting for breakfast to arrive
I spotted this little scene up in a tree at the Green Gulch Farm, near San Francisco, California:
The spider didn’t seem to mind the soggy weather a bit. Should you find yourself in the San Francisco area (in particular, in Marin county), we’d highly recommend a stop at Green Gulch Farm. The people there are friendly, and it’s a wonderful quiet place for a stroll (even on a wet day)…
Night snow
So a few months back, we got a late afternoon dusting of very sticky wet snow — the immediate result was an odd vertical ridge of snow on top of all our trees’ branches. So lit only by our porch light, I had to grab a shot of this unusual scene:
It took a little help from Topaz Adjust to bring out the contrast in what’s admittedly a very abstract image…
Bloomin’
A little bit of autumn color to brighten up a wintery day:
This was on opportunistic shot I took on a lunchtime photowalk some months back.
Blue kaboom
An oldie but goodie from Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington:
Hope everybody had a fun and festive holiday break! It’s almost hard for me to believe now that I took this with my first DSLR nearly four years ago…
Treekeh
A little seasonal bokeh from our front yard:
Sorry about the thin posting schedule lately, writing photo guidebooks has been absorbing my every waking moment — but the end’s in sight!
Seed head
A spur-of-the-moment shot from a solo photowalk a few weeks back:
I have no idea what kind of plant grew these seeds, but I liked how the swirl of the seed head mirrored the feel of the bokeh background. It’s just one of those things I don’t really have words for, you know?
Looking back at Autumn…
…from the start of Winter:
A shot from a lunchtime walk about a month back, before the season’s first big snowfall wiped out the colors.
House of the Cenote
At the ancient Maya ruins of Tulúm, México:
This was a tricky shot to get — bright sky above, and (dark, cave-like) cenote below. It didn’t turn out well as a multi-image HDR, for some odd reason — but tweaking a single image and running HDR on that did the trick. Amazingly, the structure at the top still has some of its original (500+ year old) plaster, in spite of being close to the cliff’s edge and the Caribbean.
Want to know more about photography in Tulúm? You might want to check this out…
Temple Row
One of the odd things about visiting ruins is that the tour guide books seem to always give them short shrift when it comes to photography. The books will tell you that this set of ruins is more scenic than that one, and one or two things to see at a site — but they always seem to miss a lot of really nice stuff (possibly in the interest of fitting in more plugs for affiliated hotels and such). This is one of those missed things at the Maya ruins of Tulúm, México:
If you walk down to the far southeast corner of the ruins (on an unofficial trail), you can sight up along the coast to get this nice composition. Much better than some of the other coastal shots you can make here (and the colors came out far nicer than I’d expected they would)…