Matthew - 4 Days Old

Of couse my favorite photos from 2010 are all of Matthew, our son born in September. This has definitely been the year of Matthew as we prepared for his arrival and then adjusting to the new routine of family life.  As the first four months of life with Matthew comes to a close, looking back at this photo of Matthew at just 4 days old brings a lot into perspective.  The hat which was too big for him then won’t even fit now; it’s amazing how quickly he is growing up!

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

February

X Marks the Horsetail Falls Firefall in Yosemite National Park

For a few days each February, the angle of the sunset in Yosemite valley lines up such that the setting sun creates a sliver of light on Horsetail Falls.  This sunset lights up Horsetail Falls like the Yosemite firefalls of the past. All of this assumes that mother nature cooperates with the clouds and weather. This past February I was lucky to get good weather during my trip to Yosemite to capture the Horsetail Falls firefall two days in a row. The above HDR photo capture the wider scene as the sunset approached it’s narrowest and just after two airplanes had just flown over, creating this X in the sky over the fire falls like a real world treasure map.

Note: The same angle happens in October as well, but since Horsetail Falls is a ephemeral waterfalls you usually don’t have water flowing over it in October.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS with Canon 1.4x Extender)

April

Purple Lupin Growing Along a Hillside near Oroville, CA.

In April, myself and a friend drove up to Oroville, CA to Table Mountain to check out the wildflowers that always propagate this area. The fields were full of small yellow flowers and purple lupin.  From a distance creating a carpeting affect.  I like how the above photo shows the diversity of this area with the lupin in the foreground, the carpet affect in the mid-ground, and the hillside of trees in the distance.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

A Lone Oak with Weathered Fallen Branches near Oroville, CA.

While exploring Table Mountain, I discovered a lone Oak tree in a ravine.  It had a collection of fallen branches that had weathered over the years and create a very intriguing set of patterns and lines. Once converted to a black and white photo, the lines became even more apparent. It seems like every year there is a few photos of mine that just seem to work best in Black and White.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

Lobby of One Bush Plaza in Downtown San Francisco, California.

While walking through downtown San Francisco, on a route that I frequent monthly, I suddenly realized this wonderful scene that I have been walking past for years.  Maybe it was the time of day and the way the light was illuminating the area, maybe it was my frame of mind (maybe it was both).But I walked 50 feet past and stopped, turned around and created the above image.  It’s the layering of details and lighting that keep me coming back to this photo time and time again.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

June

Field of Wild Iris with Distant Snow Capped Eastern Sierra Peaks

While visiting Bodie State Historic Park east of the Sierra Nevadas, I happened to stumble across a wonderful field of wild iris’.  The with snow still capping the Sierra Nevada Mountain peaks in the distance, I had to take an hour detour to photograph the scene.   The idillic nature of the place still speaks to me when I see this photo.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II)

Front Display Window of Boone Store and Warehouse (Westward View of Standard Stamp Mill, Firehouse, and Dodge Graham Truck)

Years ago I had the idea for a unique way of documenting Bodie State Historic Park, the abandoned ghost town maintain in a constant state of decay in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevadas. As it can sometimes happen with a project, a single image sticks with you and becomes central to the project.  For this project it was this image of the front of the Boone Store on Bodie’s main intersection. The reflection of the nearby buildings in the large window while at the same time showing the preserved state of the interior of the store became the genesis of my photography book Reflecting on Bodie (and became the cover image).

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II)

Cab of Refurbished 1921 Dodge Graham Truck (Southwest View Down Main Street of Morgue and Miner

Part of the challenge in creating the photos for my Reflecting on Bodie book was looking beyond he obvious for reflections of Bodie. This photo of the windscreen of the Dodge Graham Truck sitting on the mainstreet in Bodie is one of my favorite non-obvious reflections.  The way you can see the inside of the car cab, through the rear window of the car to the buildings behind, as well as the reflection of the buildings sitting infront of the car perfectly symbolized the duplicity the reflections at Bodie can provide.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

July

Seawall and Seal Rocks at Dusk

July was the Scott Kelby World Wide Photowalk.  I joined the photowalk lead by Jim Goldstein at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco. This photo of Seal Rock was the winning photo chosen from all the photos submitted from Jim’s photowalk. It was my favorite long before this though, the moodiness of this photo keeps drawing me in.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS)

October

Halloween Decorations at Night

Halloween always kicks off the house decorating season.  My wife usually mixes Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations and this year it was a combination of pumpkins, candles, and jack-o-lantern lights. The great textured pumpkins and the soft candle light made for a great combinations for a HDR photo project.  This photo was my favorite from that evenings work.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II)

November

Colorful Autumn Leaves on Pebble Sidewalk

This year I wasn’t able to make my fall pilgrimage to the Eastern Sierras for autumn leaves display.  However, the late in the season color change of all the trees in our neighbor hood allowed me to get my fix right in my own front yard.  This collection of leaves on the pebble sidewalk was waiting for me just a few feet from my front door!

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Zeiss Macro 100mm f/2 Makro-Planar T*)

December

Sunrise over Dublin Hills East Bay Regional Park

Winter is the time for landscape photography in the Bay Area.  We finally get interesting clouds in the sky and the rain helps to create more mood with lighting and fog.  One early morning I checked out a newly opened regional park on the hills a few miles south of my house.  The early morning light combined with ground fog made for this wonderful view to start the day.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS)

Coyote Silhouetted in Orange Glow of Sunrise

While returning to my car after the previous sunrise photo was taken, I meet up with a local coyote who was also enjoying the morning sunrise.  After following him around for about 30 minutes, I was able to photograph him on the ridge of the hill just as the sun came up over the horizon.  Then he disappeared down the other side of the hill.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS with Canon 1.4x Extender

Yosemite Lodge Holiday Tree

Before Christmas, the family and I spent the weekend in Yosemite.  I was all exciting about the potential for a dumping of snow during our stay (naturally it rained, then snowed the day after we left).  However, the holiday lights set up at Yosemite Lodge made for the perfect HDR photo opportunity (thanks to my trusty Golf umbrella).

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

Yosemite Lodge Mountain Room Restaurant & Christmas Tree

This night time view of Yosemite Lodge Mountain Room Restaurant at Yosemite Lodge just cried out to me to be photographed.  So in the middle o the rain storm, while the rest of the family was enjoying Hot Totties in the lounge, I was out in the cold rain to create this magical image.

(Photo taken with Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L)

Looking back on 2010, it was a great year of photography, accomplishments, and change.  I hope your 2010 was as memorable and 2011 is even better!

(Note: click through on the photos to view more details, purchase prints, or license stock usage via the photo archive.)

Update:  This yearly tradition continues in large part due to a blog project that is coordinated each January by Jim Goldestein.  I want to thank Jim for continuing his efforts in this project, I anxiously look forward to his posting of all of this year’s participants.

If you found this post via Jim’s blog project, Welcome!  Please subscribe to my RSS feed, join me at my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter to stay in touch through 2011!

Bay Window of Burkham House

This is one of my favorite images from my Reflecting on Bodie book project.  While having a dividing element running right through your photo can be distracting, in this case I think it adds to the abstract nature of this photo.  In this photo I was able to capture four different glimpses of Bodie thanks to this box window that jutted out form the corner of the Burkham House.

The left side of the window reflects the view up along the side of the house. The right center image reflects additional buildings from Bodie located down the hill from the Burkham House. The far right shows you a bit of the front porch of the house.  And of course if you look through the window you see the haunting decayed interior of the house.

This is the multi-faceted nature of Bodie that I was able to capture in the images contained in this book.  I’ve been working on making a printed version of the book available through Blurb and I’m just waiting on my proof copy to arrive before accepting book orders.  If you’re interested in a printed version of Reflecting on Bodie, please drop me a note and I’ll make sure to alert you directly once it’s available.

Campana House & Main Street

Sunrise illuminates Main Street of Bodie as seen reflected in the window of the Campana House.  One of the photos from my book Reflecting on Bodie.

One of the challenges of meeting up with photographers that you know is that you end up talking as much (or more) as you do making photos.  You’ll notice this time and time again in the following Sunday Morning Short:

(watch it in HD for the best experience…)

Since the high fog and flat light were a bit uninspiring at first arrival, I climbed up to an overlook while everyone else was down at the Baths photographing.  I thought it was a perfect chance to roll some film for time lapse sequence of photographers in action. Only yesterday when I uploaded this video did I learn of the Life in a Day project which this video happened to qualify for and I happen to upload in time to participate.  So I submitted it to the project as the chance coincidents were trying to tell me something…

At the end of the day, I ended up with a handful of photos that made my final cut for the photowalk.  You can also view all the photos that were submitted to the photowalk flickr group that Jim setup.

With it being winter, you get the added bonus of snow in the various mountain ranges and the wonderful contrast that provides.  Earlier this year I did a flight from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina about the same time of day and noticed the same wonderful landscape.  Back then I thought to myself “I need to bring my DSLR and zoom lens next time I do this trip”.  Of course, didn’t have my camera with today.  So I did what I could with my iPhone (hence the often seen plane wind in the photos) and edited everything using Photogene to adjust the exposure, boost the contrast, and crop here and there.

Of course, the scratched up and dirty window of an airplane makes for a horrible filter to photograph through, hence the need to do more contrast adjustment than I would have normally done.  This helps to bring out the sunset contrast that I was seeing in the landscape below.  The wonderful alluvial plains, river valleys, and hills of the Southwest are very dramatic when seen from above.  Too bad I didn’t have a GPS device to be able to know where I was and what I was looking down upon.  At one point, it must have been near the four corners and this looked like it might have been the Colorado River:

What was even more ironic was that I was listening to my back log of Jeff Curto’s Camera Position podcasts while I was taking all these photos.  Talk about changing your camera position to get a unique perspective!

I have another trip coming up soon to the East Coast where I will be traveling with my larger photo kit.  I’m already planning on traveling the same time of day, getting a window seat in the back, and use the good glass of my zoom lens to see what I can capture.  Stay tuned for that follow on arial photo project…

]]> http://www.latogaphoto.com/2010/03/17a-southwest-508/feed/ 0 http://www.latogaphoto.com/2009/08/photo-tools-freedom-sign/ http://www.latogaphoto.com/2009/08/photo-tools-freedom-sign/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:18:07 +0000 latoga http://www.latogaphoto.com/?p=1411

Tools of Freedom Sign

While returning from our road trip to the Pacific Northwest, we were driving along the Olympic Peninsula of Washington when I spotted the following business sign.  I had to pull over to take a photo for my ongoing Signs Project.  This project is all about capturing photographs of signs that I encounter in my travels that are unintentional, unplanned, unexpected, or quirky.

Tools of “Freedom” (why the quotes I wonder?) not only made us miss our turn and take a unplanned detour, but also helped to break the monotony of the road (and detour) as a running punchline for at least the next 100 miles.

This is the view from my studio/digital darkroom. Actually this is mostly my digital dark room as I have another room (with large north facing windows and vaulted ceilings) which doubles as a studio. Nothing creative, nothing stylized, just my workspace and my view. Both change over time.

The trees outside my window will start to bud and grow their leaves in the next few months. This will create the seasonal curtain which closes over my neighbor’s house. Then the leaves will turn yellow as the days grow shorter. Eventually exposing the bare branches when next fall’s rains come again.

The desk that is my workspace will have piles of papers come and go just like the leaves on the trees. Hopefully much faster than the leaves, but often times not. Camera equipment gets left out after a shot; mementos of travel and work get dropped where there is room and shuffled from place to place. Then I get the itch of frustration (or is it just procrastination for some other task?) and do a clean sweep of the desk to start the cycle anew.

When I first came up with the idea for the View from Your Studio blog project, I was going through my end of year contemplations. So I was thinking about photography, my goals, and what enablers or restrictions I had with regarding those goals. I realized that the view from my studio had a large impact on my photographic work.

The studio view pictured above is the same view I have from my home office. The home office which I spend many a day in for my day job. So when the evenings or weekends come, it can be a real struggle to spend more time in the home office to work on processing photos. This has resulted in a lot of photographing just to change my view, but photographs that most don’t see…photographs stuck in my personal picture purgatory.

So, the view from my studio both drives my photography and hinders it at the same time.

(Note: if the photo above has you seeing Red, my apologies. And I mean actual red. The walls of my office should be orange, but I noticed on my new wide color gamut monitor that the walls appear red but not on my laptop screen. If you have a wide color gamut monitor, try viewing this screen on another monitor, it might help get the red out…)

Something about the simplicity of this window sign drew me in.  And the depth created by the reflection captured in the window added something more to the image.

I spotted this window sign while walking along the Embarcadero, it was the clutter and the way the sun was hitting that clutter that made me stop and take a second look.  After a few seconds the different signs in this image appeared to me.