angel island

New year, new resolution to post more pictures! Last July already, I went with some friends to Angel Island. Located in the middle of the bay, it is a great place to spend a long afternoon touring the island either on foot or by bicycle (which you can rent on the island). There is a long outer loop of the island and a shorter inner loop both of which are very bike/hike friendly. From the inner loop you can hike up (no bicycles) to the top of the island. From this top point, there is a 360 view of the bay area, from SF to Sausalito and Marin to Berkeley to Oakland and back to SF. On this particular day, the views of Sausalito were so pretty, they reminded me of the costal towns of italy.

We started the day at the Ferry Building which is a great place to grab some lunch from the Farmer's Market to picnic with on the Island. The Blue and Gold line to Angel Island picks up behind the Ferry Building (but will only drop you back off in Fisherman's Wharf) and you can buy your tickets either in the building or even on the boat itself.

It was a good time of year for flowers at the Farmer's Market:

The views as the ferry leaves SF are really great. I tried to make these first few look like old postcards, I think it worked!:

America's Cup Prada boat & Alcatraz: 

Some panoramas happened:

On the island itself, there are lots of interesting buildings from back in the day when it was a fort and immigration station:

The views just really aren't bad:

The Portofino-esque Saulsalito:

cornhenge

A couple of exciting things happened on a quick trip back to Ohio over the holidays. First, I got to see some snow flurries. And second, we visited Cornhenge. This is a field of corn statues officially called Field of Corn (with Osage Orange Trees). Although it is is in a very office-parky area (located at 4995 Rings Rd in Dublin, OH), it is quite pretty and I think the world needs more oddball stuff. Giant corn statues? Why not.

While driving up 33/Riverside Drive between Upper Arlington to Dublin (where Cornhenge lives), we also stopped to take a few pictures of the pretty trees along the river. 

newborn - baby b

Just a couple of months after the Baby B Maternity shoot, I was thrilled to go back and meet the brand new Ms. B in person! At just 10 days old, she was a trooper. Again, it was great to take photos with her parents who this time were more than fully prepared with the baby outfits. My favorites are the hand and feet photos.

 

maternity - baby b

My first maternity shoot! This was a ton of fun and the couple was prepared with lots of cute ideas and were game for just about anything. I'd done some maternity photo research online in preparation and the one thing that seemed an absolute requirement for a good maternity shoot was a field of wheat. That's a tall order in San Francisco, but we found the next best thing up on Bernal Heights Park (you know, that beige hill to the south of the Mission that you always wonder about).  Turns out, it's a great place for pictures!

macro class

I had a fun afternoon yesterday in a Macro photography class that Canon offered in downtown SF. They have a great series of classes that are all really affordable and in off-work hours. See the list of classes here. The Macro class was more of a set up of cool things to take pictures of, not really formal instruction.  I was surprised how low sales-y this was, I would have easily sat through (might have even preferred) a half hour on all of the ins and outs of their macro lens line up but they were like, you can borrow this one, sorry it's all we have. Anyway, the lens I borrowed was great, the 100mm f/2.8 L series (think I'll still buy the lower end version of the 100mm). Then around the room they had set ups of a variety of macro situations.

What did I learn? Well, this really is the opposite of portrait photography, it's all about tripods and f/11, f/16 to get as much clarity as possible, not very mobile, not about wide apertures at all.  I also learned how to zoom in while in Live Mode to get crisper manual focus.

The coolest set up by far was water dripping into a pan. This was just a plastic cup with a hole in the  bottom suspended over a black plate with a swirly watercolor on the wall behind it. Tripod in front, remote shutter release. These are mostly at 1/125 sec at f/16.

There was also a set up of a glycerine drop on a leaf, which nicely reflected flowers behind it. However the glycerine had started to sag a little:

Orchids with some water spray, this set up fired off two remote flashes. Remote flashes are still a mystery to me. 

 And if you see me hanging around toy train supply stores it's because of this set up.