Saturday, January 9, 2010

Some Photos I Took During Our California Trip

One day after Lori's surgery, we drove down Sunset Boulevard to the beach and hung out for an hour or two. I took a few photos I wanted to post here. These first ones are of a rusted out steel barrier intended to keep the sand from washing away sideways down the beach, I think. I thought it was interesting to see the water splash over and through it. In one of these you can see little fish swimming in the surf.All of these birds were clamoring for space on this rock outcropping.
These next two would make good desktop photos for your computer! I think it's interesting to take a repetetive/monotonous field and do foreground/midground/background things with focus and depth of field. I'd like to do more stuff like that; I need to get more familiar with my camera's settings and capabilities. The first shot here would look better with the background fuzzy, I think.
This one almost got me (and the camera) all wet!Some babe was too busy talking on her cell phone to notice me stalking her, so I snapped her photo when she wasn't looking. She apparently forgot her bikini that day, however.Somebody made a couch out of the stones lining the beach (which were actually just well-worn pieces of old concrete that had been dumped in there years ago; one might think that would be a really ugly thing on a beach, but I thought that after all those years of weathering they actually had a neat look to them with all their corners and rough edges worn off). This would be a cool place to sit and watch the sun set!
This aging hippy was so into his yoga zen that I could also snap his photo without him noticing. I kept watching to see if he would levitate, but he didn't. This time.
In this one, you can really see how tiny the guy was, about twice as tall as an average seagull, included in the photo for reference.At first glance, this just looks like a dead crustacean washed up on the beach, but upon closer inspection we see that...well, yeah, it's just a dead crustacean washed up on the beach. I thought the colors and the little crusty things on it were cool, okay? Lori, no commenting allowed. I've heard enough about it in real life already.Aha! On closer inspection we see these tiny little sand fleas popping in and out of the dead mollusk. Fascinating! (I'm easily entertained.) I took like 30 photos of these little guys and was tempted to post them all here, but I decided just to pick out the best one instead. They were surprisingly difficult to photograph, what with them hopping about and everything.Here's a photo stolen from the Internet of a more well-behaved one, which also looks a little older. The ones I saw were really tiny. I messed around with them for quite awhile and didn't have any problems, but, apparently, they bite.A beach-side house, probably worth a few bazillion dollars or something, before the bubble. Now it's on the market for $4.99, OBO (furnished). No thanks, I'll keep my normal-looking house in bubbleless (so far) Rexburg. Besides, this will probably be the first house to hit the drink when California falls into the sea, or when the next el nino pattern comes. (For those of you who don't speak espanol, el nino is Spanish for... "the nino!")
More sea birds. They were quite tame and I could get pretty close up. They acted genuinely annoyed when I got so close they actually had to stand up.
These pelicans made for interesting subjects, I thought. I love their little faux-hawks.
I'm going to submit this one to National Geographic, and tell them I had to swim out to a deserted island in Tahiti to take it, holding my camera above water the whole time.We also went to a place called the LaBrea Tar Pits, which is a place where tar comes bubbling out of the ground and has trapped all kinds of animals over the eons. Nerdy little scientists like this guy extract all the bones, clean off the tar, and make exhibits out of them. It was an interesting little museum, partly outdoors. Smelled like an asphalt plant in there.
More foreground/background stuff. Should have gotten the camera closer to the ground.
City Hall in Beverly Hills.
Cool looking tree in a park we visited. You can't see it in the photo, but there are hundreds of names, messages, and other sorts of graffiti carved into the bark. Old-fashioned facebook!
I'm not sure what kind of tree it is. Could it be a mangrove?