366 days of Abby

I decided not to make any New Year's resolutions this year. I made a good set last year and stuck to them. For the most part they turned out well. But the one most everybody knew about became a little too tedious as the year dragged on so I don't think I'll keep it up. My 366 Day of Abby album on Facebook became a pretty popular attraction, at least for the few friends a quiet guy like me has.

The intention wasn't to create some internet sensation like those YouTube videos of a kid's face morphing as he/she grew older. I really wanted something to force me to get out and interact with the world, with Abby, so that hopefully she would be more outgoing and adventurous than her reserved and overly rational Dad. I also wanted to get on her good side so when Mir and I are old and our retirement is depleted she'll hopefully let us stay in the spare cottage at her lakeside summer home.

In no particular order, these are my favorite shots from the year. If your favorite isn't here, sorry, start your own blog.

Not everyday was as adventurous as I'd hoped but I think Abby and I still had a pretty photogenic 2012. Sometimes a trip to Costco was all the adventure we needed

The neighborhood parks were our most common destination.

Every so often we'd trek further. To the Capitol or up to the little Folsom City Zoo

I think this is my favorite shot from the year. It was just a little adventure Abby and I did while Mir was in class. She didn't know why she had to stick her head thru the hole but she did it for me anyway. I think the expression on her face says exactly that, too.

Abby's favorite place to go was the beach. Any beach. Mostly that meant Baker Beach in SF where Mir and whoever else we brought along could look for seaglass while Abby and I wandered.

Sometimes the beach was preceded by a trip to the Zoo. The SF Zoo always seems to be the perfect, cool temperature and hardly ever crowded. A ride on the train is highly recommended.

But not every day had the time or weather needed for a good adventure. Some days were meant to just flomp on the couch.

We could work off the energy indoors around the house

 and challenging the cats

These were also good days to practice portraits

Abby is so photogenic even her bedhead looks amazing

And just to make sure everyone knows she means business, with no help from anybody else, just a natural gangster

No matter what our adventure was, big or small, Abby shined everyday with the enthusiasm only a child can have where everything is new and wonderful. I'm glad I was able to spend every day with her.

I'm looking forward to seeing what 2013 has in store for us.

The Night Shift

I know I've said this a few times already here but having a family changes everything. You get to wake up with a beautiful girl by your side every morning. There's also a wonderful little person whose whole world revolves around you. You always have someone to laugh with when you're happy or to cheer you up when you're down. The goodness of it all makes it easy to forget about things like updating a blog.

Not wanting to spend too much time away from Mir and Abby I found myself often going out for photos after everyone else has fallen asleep. One place I thought would be good for night photos was the open space in Vacaville I'd visited several times in the past few years. Specifically the old dead oak tree looked like a perfect fit for star trails photography. One late night in July I headed down and set up a few cameras for a some different angles of the tree.
Facing north:

Facing northeast, back over part of the city:

There was an amazing amount of stars visible just a quarter mile hike up the hill from town. Even the Milky Way galaxy was bright enough to capture nicely.

A heavy amount of light pollution from Fairfield and Vacaville washed out the horizon but I kind of like the way the sky blends to black up the photo.

After seeing how well the galaxy showed up I wanted to try a few more angles with the tree. I headed back in mid-September. The Milky Way had shifted in the sky and was now more towards the east.

There is nothing to the northeast of Vacaville so the sky was nice and dark in that direction even though the autumn Milky Way wasn't as bright. And the light from the city lit up the tree and hillside perfectly.

While shooting the old tree I set up another camera for star trails around another oak down the hill. Looking north again:

I also liked the boulders around this tree and set up another star trails shot to include them, this time looking east.

Between those two shoots we took a weekend trip up to Lake Tahoe to hang out on the beaches. Again, after everyone went to bed I headed out to watch the meteor shower. Inspired by the first trip to Vacaville I wanted to get the Milky Way with a meteor. I went to the lookout over Emerald Bay and set up. Unfortunately the two didn't cooperate so again it's a tree and a galaxy.

Kiva beach has been a favorite of ours since we found it a couple years ago. I went there to try a different angle for the meteorites. It was a nice night out and there were a lot of other people laying on the sand watching the show. Still no shooting stars over the galaxy but the view over the lagoon was still really pretty.

Another good show in the sky I love to watch is the River Cats Saturday night fireworks. The first weekend of August I got off work early on Saturday and decided to try 3D at the Tower Bridge again. As I left Davis the sky started flashing. We don't get lightning too often around here and I got excited thinking I could get fireworks, lightning, and the iconic bridge all in one amazing 3D photo. I found a good parking spot and hurried over to the promenade. Just as I fired my first camera a huge bolt cracked across the sky over the stadium and across the bridge. Two more strikes came a couple minutes after. This is a combined shot of all three.

Unfortunately the show was over before I got my higher resolution cameras set up for 3D. While waiting for the fireworks to start the bridge was lifted for the hornblower river cruise ship to pass. I took a long exposure shots of it going thru and kept the cameras in the same place until the fireworks then combined the images again.

The first time I shot the fireworks here they coincided with the raising of the bridge. I've been trying to capture that moment again ever since but have only succeeded with the magic of photoshop.

A couple weeks later and another early night off work meant another chance to shoot the fireworks. This time I wanted something radically different. After some searching on google maps, I went a little over a mile away to the top of the Sutter Hospital parking garage. This gave a good view of the top of the Capitol building and the Sacramento skyline with an opening right where the fireworks were.

I don't want to sound like a cheater but this is another composite image. Notice how the big bloom on top becomes squiggley away from its center? On a six second exposure the camera was still for about 3 seconds then slightly wiggled. The shake created squigglies in the fireworks. I combined that with another unshaken photo to keep the buildings crisp.

As we got into autumn I didn't have to rely on starry skies or fireworks for good shows. I still haven't found a great spot around town for sunsets. I tried going back to the lone tree south of Davis that I sunsetted before

Did a hike around Lagoon Valley park in Vacaville but the water level was too low and it gave me a dirty foreground

I even got so desperate I used a curve in the road for a foreground.

Pretty skies are just not interesting enough on their own. But this is California, there's always a beautiful scene out there a short car ride away. I used the UC Davis football game at Cal Poly as a good excuse to take a little family vacation and, hopefully, find a pretty place to photograph. We left late Friday night, so Abby would sleep for the five hour car ride, and got into Morro Bay at almost 3am. I think there was a pretty sunrise Saturday but on 3 1/2 hours sleep all I could do was peak my head out the window and fall back into bed. There was a really nice sunset that night, too, at least what I saw of it from the football stadium. After Mir and Abby fell asleep I went into night mode again. The moon was setting perfectly between Morro Rock and a small rock to its north. A fishing boat was also leaving the harbor, its spotlight providing great fill light on the massive rock.

The moon lit up the clouds nicely and also balanced out the two parking lot lights on the other side. It's not the great sunrise/sunset shot I'd hoped for but I'm still happy with it. By morning the fog developing at the top of the rock had clouded the whole bay and ruined any chance of a sunrise photo op.

The one place that always looks great and I can take the family with me on photo expeditions is San Francisco and the Golden Gate. This past week we took Miranda's mom Patti down to Baker Beach to look for seaglass. Thanks to a re-broken arm I got to ride passenger and play with the camera. Usually we hold our breath and make a wish thru the tunnel north of the Golden Gate but this time I was too busy taking pictures.

We played down on Baker Beach until sunset when Mir, Abby, and I wandered down to a storm drain flowing into the ocean. I hadn't seen it before but liked the way the bridge reflected in it. I talked Mir into letting me stay a few minutes later to get the night lights in the water.

It's nice to know I don't have to sneak out in the middle of the night alone to get great shots.

Lazy days of summer

So it's been pretty quiet the past couple months. I had my now annual use-it-or-lose-it three week summer vacation in June. Mostly just hung out with Abby while Miranda studied for finals and then finished some research internships she had.

May and June did have two big astronomical events that Abby and I got to see together. First was the annular eclipse visible across northern California. I thought about driving two hours north to see the full eclipse but decided to see a pretty close to full one from our yard. Staying here let me share the view with the family and some of the neighborhood kids, too. Here's the peak

and a time lapse put together in photoshop

I used a 13-stop Kodak filter fitted to the front of my medium telephoto lens. It was great for seeing sunspots but probably wasn't needed at the peak. If I had it to do over I would've gone down to the Amtrak station and done a wide angle time lapse there instead. I think I'll only have to wait 5 years for that.

A couple weeks later the filter came in handy again when Venus transited the sun. I took Abby to a viewing party at Explorit and I think she had an idea of what she was looking at.

This won't happen for another 105 years. I'll be long gone but hopefully Abby will still be around and will have a vintage photo of herself to share with great-great-grandkids. After playing with Abby at the park I went out at sunset to try and get the show with something in the foreground. A few sunflowers from seeds of last year's crop had popped up in a wheat field near the house. I tried to incorporate one into the shot but the sun is a pretty bright object that silhouettes everything else. 

The thin ribbons of clouds helped dramatize the photo. A few days before this there were some more prominent clouds around sunset. Miranda had been asking me to get some shots of those sunflowers so I biked on over and snapped a few quick shots using the filter and holder I'd built for the Nikon lens. 

The rest of the vacation we used on family trips including one to Tahoe where I found these cool little butterflies

The iridescent shimmer on their wings looks great printed on metallic paper. We also day tripped to the Sacramento Zoo

and a kids' discovery museum in Sausalito. That museum is down at Ft Baker, just before the Golden Gate. When we came thru the tunnel and I saw the fog across the bridge I told Miranda that I had to stop just for one quick photo.

There is a standard view of the bridge from Battery Spencer that everyone takes. But the way the fog was moving I wanted to show more of the northern traffic lanes and that view is only found by holding the camera out over a chain link fence. The first time I came to this vista point for photos I was so anxious to get a shot I stopped here before getting that great view that you're supposed to get. But after looking at thousands of other photos from this area I only found one other person who thought to take a shot this way (and post it on the internet.) The combination of the fog, wildflowers, and long stretch of bridge leading to the north tower makes this my favorite shot of the Golden Gate. 

With the Golden Gate on my mind I tried planning out a good view for the 4th of July. Last year at Ft Baker we could see the Sausalito fireworks behind us so I wanted to see if I could use them with the Bridge for a unique view. I wanted the bridge head on, with the towers aligned, and mapped out where to go for the shot. One place was at the south edge of the bridge, the other was at Grand View park. On the 2nd I went down to check it out and see if perhaps the Marin Co Fair fireworks would be visible. They weren't, but the view was still grand. 

When the 4th rolled around I checked the live web cams in SF and saw the fog was going to be way too thick to get this shot. So we saved the gas money and driving time and stayed in Davis with some of Mir's friends. But if the fog is clear next year I definitely want to try again. 

I came back down to SF a week later to get Giants fireworks with the Bay Bridge. Not wanting to be stuck in Friday afternoon traffic I left early and did some exploring around the SF side of the Golden Gate. 

The view at Ft Point which should be called Ft. Windiest Place in the World

I then walked on the Golden Gate for the first time. Looking up at the south tower

Looking down on the pelicans.

There were also a bunch of dolphins playing, including a mother and calf, but the great photos I thought I had were all out of focus. Thanks Canon. Back to the land one last shot looking back from a picnic area below the viewing lot. What to do on a gloomy, overcast day? Use a large aperture to set the mood with vignetting and wait for nature to help fill out the frame.  

With the fog getting thicker I debated staying for sunset but the whole point of the trip was to get fireworks and the Bay Bridge. A quick stop at the national cemetery at the Presidio with fog casting the bridge in a ghostly fashion. 

Across town at Treasure Island the clouds had gotten lower and were looking to ruin the view. I set up 3 cameras but none could overcome the overcastness. 

I will go back to this sometime if just for a sunset/blue hour photo without the fireworks (and the clouds.) Just for reference, here's the Giants' fireworks back in April from down at the base of the island

One bridge I never have problems with during fireworks shows is the Tower Bridge in Sacramento. I tried doing 3D here one with telephoto lenses

and again with wide angles

but I think I need to move the cameras farther apart to make the 3D more apparent. And a regular photo from the grass islands along the Capitol Mall. 

One last shot from a couple nights ago. It was 100 degrees, no wind and no moon. Great for star trails. A sunflower field east of town with convenient parking beckoned. 

I shouldn't have waited til dark to set up. Just a half mile from town, maybe a hundred yards from I-80, but pitch black in walking down those rows trying to find a south facing flower. I finally gave up and went with the flowers looking east back into town. Not great but I did catch a pretty bright shooting star. How's about a wish for more great photos in the near future?