Playing Catchup

I was camping all weekend long with the family up at El Capitan State Beach.  What a great place to get away from the business of the city!  It’s just a couple hours away from Los Angeles, but it makes you forget that how close you actually are to a major city.

Here are a few photos that I took over the weekend to bring me current on my 365.  Bad news is that I’m headed to New York for a couple days and will not have time for any photos other than whatever I take with my iPhone.  So I’ll be dark two more days then I’ll have a couple days of my best iPhone images on my return.

Cheers!

Sunset at El Capitan, March 12

Rock Stacking at El Capitan, March 13

Rock Stacks at El Capitan, March 13

Nate's Rock Stack, March 13

Dawn at El Capitan State Beach, March 14

Sea urchin shell, March 15

Getting Over It

Slept horribly last night.  Felt crummy all day.  Spent the entire day at home.  Highlight was getting the kid to eat a good dinner including some collard greens sauteed with olive oil and garlic.  (He loved them!  Yay, me!)  Nate didn’t take a nap so he went down pretty easily.  Since the wife is still in Vegas, I can’t go surfing tomorrow morning.  The good news is that I will be sleeping in for as long as Nate will let me.

Okay, I know that everything I just wrote has nothing to do with the photo below, but it might explain why I’m resorting to my second night in a row of shooting some on my kitchen counter.

Cerith Shell

Shells #3

Early morning meetings usually mean that I’m shooting something in the evening after my son is asleep.  Easiest to shoot things lying around the house.  We have a lot of shells lying around lately so I just grabbed a couple for tonight’s shoot.

Gizmodo is running a photo contest this week for what you can shoot in complete darkness except for the light of a single candle.  There are no fancy prizes or anything, but I thought I’d try to kill two birds with one stone.  I thought having just one candle might create too contrasty an image so I built a little sweep using some white paper and paper clips.  The white paper served as a nice reflector to fill in some of the areas that would have been in dark shadows otherwise.

I thought I’d add a photo of how I set up my shoot on the kitchen counter.  Of course, when I actually snapped the photos, all the kitchen lights were turned off.

Shell 1

Shell 2

How I set up the shot

Shells #2

The family trip to the tidal pools yesterday was not without its fair share of collecting shells and little bits of sea glass.  Here are a couple shells that we found yesterday.

Shell 1, Perspective 1

Shell 1, Perspective 2

Shell 2, Perspective 1

Shell 2, Perspective 2

Shells

Here are some shells and a sand dollar that Nate and I have collected over the past couple weeks.

Spiral Shell 1

Spiral Shell 2

Scallop Shell

Sand Dollar