Come Inside to the Past

One of the things I like to do, to practice up on my photography, is to visit museums which have a lot of old relics of odds and ends. One of these fine places is the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista, California.

At this museum, you can find a lot more than just engines. You can find old cars, trucks, tractors, lawnmowers, etc... which housed these engines. There is also this neat wooden barn, right as you enter the museum grounds.

As you can see, there looks like there are some neat old goodies inside. Every time, it seems, when I have visited in the past, these barn doors were always closed. It was a nice surprise to finally see the doors open.

There are 3 things I really find appealing about this scene. One is obviously the vintage car. Another thing I find appealing is also the barn itself with all the wood boards framing the car. Lastly, I really like all the old wooden wheel spokes.

For this image, the barn acted as a nice "frame inside a frame." The wheel spokes also further framed the car. Also, with the car being parked just barely inside the barn, you had nice light on the car and I liked how the light just tapers off the further your eyes look into the barn.

Finally, I processed this as a black-and-white image, with a touch of sepia tone. There is another car parked right behind and it had a vibrant green color, which easily had about the only color in the scene, that really jumped out. So naturally, I wanted to neutralize that would-be distraction.

This museum is really a nice place to visit and they offer many events, usually on Saturdays, for both young and old alike. That is also a time when they operate some of the countless relics found on this property. If you are into this kind of thing, then check out there website and perhaps, stop on by and see for yourself.

El Capitan Rockslide

 Another recent blog post, by bay area photographer, Dan Mitchell, captured one of those very rare moments, when you are in the right spot at the right time.

Dan was on his way out of Yosemite, on his most recent trip, when he pulled the car off at a common turnout, and decided to take a few snaps of a Yosemite icon, Half-Dome. The late day sun was displayed brilliantly in his scene. But to his delight, when he got back home and looked at his photos, he discovered a little bonus. In one of those shots, there was a mini avalanche captured in one of the series of shots he took of Half-Dome from the turnout.

If you are a big fan of Yosemite national park, you must check out his photo. It's absolutely gorgeous!

Dan's photo reminded me I was in a similar situation, on my first trip ever, into Yosemite, back in May 2009. It was my last day on the trip and I was in the meadow just below the other Yosemite icon, El Capitan.

I had just finished taking all the photos I wanted and I started walking back to the car, when I heard what I thought was the crackle of thunder. It was clouding up, so I assumed that it was indeed thunder. But while walking back, I saw many tourists heads looking back toward me and looking upwards at El Capitan. When I turned around, I realized it was a rockslide instead.

I hurried a few shots to try and get the plume of smoke or dust. Unfortunately, right as this happened, the sun partially disappeared and left the meadow and most of El Capitan in the shade, yet the sky and right where the rock-slide was occurring, it was still in the sun. It's not like I had time to put on a graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure out. Rock-slides don't exactly last all that long. Know what I mean?

Anyways, the sun did eventually come back out, but only after the dust dispersed quite a bit. In these 2 photos, I did my best to process these and chose black-and-white conversion for both, as the color versions were pretty drab. Still, it was pretty cool to have a front row seat to one of nature's powerful displays.

El Prado

When visiting San Diego, one of the city's gems is the historic Balboa Park. Balboa Park is where you will find most of the city's museums, along with some gardens, and next door, the world renown San Diego Zoo.

One of the shots I love to get at Balboa Park is the view from the one end of El Prado, by the fountain. Here, the fountain is still shut off, during the morning hours. I believe it turns on at noon. From here, you can see the natural history museum on the near right, then all the way down to the California Tower.

Now, for this shot, I used my 21mm lens and got quite low to the ground and right at the water's edge. A lot of people like to just get the reflection of the natural history museum, by taking the photo from a spot further left and filling the reflection and frame with just basically the museum itself. I kind of like leading the viewer all the way down the Prado and the California Tower is a nice ending spot. I just think it's a nice "placeholder" in the image. The moon setting is just "icing on the cake."