Another weekend, another family trip! This weekend we took our 2nd annual Memorial Day camping trip to the Humbodlt Redwoods! I took lots of pictures of Angela and Gregory, so here are some of them.

As you already know, the Eel River runs parallel for the most part to the Avenue of the Giants, where we stayed. It's a short hike down to the river.



Gregory LOVES taking his clothes off when it's warm, so we obliged.



Those pictures could have been taken just anywhere? OK, wiseguy.



This one's my favorite of Gregory down by the river.

Before heading home, we drove up north to Eureka and Trinidad, both to see the lighthouse, and to take Gregory to the ocean for the first time. He loved the beach, but didn't care much for the water. The ocean was cold, but the air was pretty warm. The wet sand was steaming, too. We dug a little hole for Gregory to play in.



I love this one as well. Gregory had a ball.



There were plenty more pictures, but I haven't had much time to scan them. This is it for now! Now it's time for me to get back to work.

As I posted before, I took three rolls of film at Bodie... one Fuji Superia 100, one Tri-X 100, and one Provia 100.  These were Tri-X


The little smudge you see is from a dirty scanner glass, sorry about that.

Out in Bodie, it was extremely remote to the point where they tried to avoid hauling out the garbage from the site as much as possible.  To that end, they did a lot of recycling... this particular building has a wall whose outer surface is made entirely out of tin cans.



Believe it or not, this was stamped on the side of an old vehicle engine.



...and a little closer:



This was taken with a +3 closeup filter, and I hadn't noticed before but it tends to distort in a circular pattern around the center.  I need a macro lens!

Leaning up against a building was a runningboard from an old Ford truck.  This scan is a bit off though, it looks almost as if I scanned a newspaper picture or something.  The print doesn't look that way.



This particular building has a story to it... one of the residents of Bodie was a bit wealthy and wanted a unique home.  He blew a hole into the side of a rock, then took the rubble and built walls around the hole.



Finally, here is one of the many rusty car-casses lying around Bodie.  The steering wheel is all metal!  My car's black rubber steering wheel is hot enough, but METAL?!?!?!  Ah the olden-days.



So that's it for my B&W photos.  I'll post the slides whenever I can scan them.  Since I don't have a negative scanner, that makes it a tad more difficult.  Until next time...

Hello again from Weekend-Trip Land!  This weekend I decided to take my wife and son to Bodie, CA, a neat ghost town in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.  My little adventure will be outlined in 3 separate posts, primarily because I don't have all the film developed yet. :)

A bit of background first, I first read about Bodie when I was online, checking out new places to take pictures.  One place kept standing out, both in travel sites and with photographers: Bodie.  At one time, it had over 10,000 residents, but became a ghost town after everyone left in the late 50s.  In the 60s, a group got together to preserve the town, and today, it's a State Park.  Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for kids over 5, under 5 are free.  Payment is strictly on the honor system, drop your $ in the box.

I asked my wife 5 or 6 days before leaving if she thought it'd be a good idea, and she said yes.  Off I went online, and started reading.  Saturday, come to find out, was "Photographer's Day".  To the general public, the park is open from 8am to 6pm, but on Photographer's Day, you can pay $30 and come into the park a half-hour before dawn, and stay a half-hour after sunset!  The ranger on the phone said that they limit the number of photographers to 50 on Photographer's Day, but in this particular case, they only had 5 or 6 people sign up.  This sounded perfect!

After work on Friday, I drove home, picked up my wife and child, and we went on our way.  5 hours later, we arrived in Bridgeport, which is 20 miles from Bodie.  We stayed the night, and at 4:30am, I snuck out and headed out to the ghost town.

Upon arrival, there was only one photographer other than myself!  He started taking pictures straightaway, so I did the same.

The sky was a beautiful shade of gray the entire time.  This made for some great light, but unfortunately, in some of the building shots here, the sky is completely washed out.

This place is a photographer's PARADISE!  I spent a good 8 hours here taking pictures, and barely scratched the surface of what was here.  This particular set of pictures was on Fuji Superia 100 film.

I walked the entire perimeter of the ghost town, trying to find the best angle towards things, and I think I succeeded to some extent.  I will admit, however, that my best pictures were taken after this, in black and white.  I also shot a roll of color slides.  In all, I took roughly 100 pictures.

I suppose I could manipulate these in Photoshop to remove the gray sky.  We'll see how the other pictures turn out before I do something that extreme.

Bodie is in what they call a state of "arrested decay" - that means that while they maintain the contents of the town, they only do so to a point.  In 1963, when the town became a State Park, they basically said ok, we can do repairs, but only fix it to the point where it looks like it does now.  So that's what they've done.

While visiting Bodie, one gets the feeling of being in the past, especially with the opportunity I had of coming early in the morning before any "tourists" arrived.  By the afternoon there were at least 200 people here.

Once again, I absolutely enjoyed myself this weekend.  I think it was a combination of things: the anticipation of arriving, being out there with only one other photographer (who I didn't see again until probably 9:30am), being able to look around and use the techniques learned in NYIP.  It was also a learning experience, since I doubt I'll make the same mistakes with the overcast sky that I did here.

Stay tuned for Parts II & III, whenever I get the B&W and slide rolls developed.

I've gotta say, I've been a little disappointed in the Sam's Club photo department as of late.

With the 15 Days in May photo contest coming up, I was getting my images ready. I wanted to get as many 5x7's as I could to make a better decision as to which one to enter, so this past week, here's how the schedule went...

Saturday: take the pictures (4 rolls)
Sunday: take film into Sam's
Sunday: pick up photos ($30), turn in several for 5x7 enlargements
Monday: pick up 5x7's ($6), turn in two for 8x10 enlargements
Tuesday: go to pick up enlargements ($10), notice one enlargement was done wrong, the other had specks of lint, ask for a redo

So this past week I spent $46. When I asked for the redo, I was treated like a lower-class citizen! When I pointed out the problems, the woman wouldn't even look me in the eye any longer, then threw the negatives onto the table in a huff.

I'm certainly not a customer service expert, but why is this happening? $46 a week isn't my average, it's more like $10 a week, but even still. Nowadays I go in there maybe 2-3 times a week, and they know my name. I'm at the point now where all I say is "Picking up 3 enlargements" and they just go get them. My point is, per month lately I've been spending maybe $75 in their department.

So why the bad attitude? I had this happen at Wal-Mart, and I stopped going there. But let's get real for a minute, at Sam's Club the 8x10's are $1.99, at Wal-Mart they're $4.99. The 5x7's at Sam's are $.69 apiece, while at Walgreen's they're $2.49. Sam's has the best price, and with the volume I've been doing lately, I can't really afford to spend much more. I could take them into Elliot's, but they charge $12 per 24-exposure roll SINGLE PRINTS. The 8x10's are $6.95.

I'll be picking up my 8x10's tomorrow... well, 8x12's. 8x10 the machine cut off the fireworks from the previous diary entry, so I had them redo it at 8x12. Hopefully they'll be done right, because tomorrow night is the Camera Club.

This Saturday, I decided to spend the day taking pictures for a photo contest that the West Sacramento is having.  They call it "extraordinary images of ordinary life", and the pictures have to taken within the city.

I started out at the riverbank, which always seems to be a good place.  At least, it is on any other day!  Apparently there was some blues concert going on, and the entire area was closed to the "public"!  It was $15 to get in, and I was more in the mood to take pictures, not pay to take pictures.

At any rate, I decided to walk across the bridge and see if there was at least a view of the city from that side.  NO!  While Sacramento has a skyline, West Sacramento does not, other than the old Money Store building, and that's where the concert was being held.

I walked back across the bridge and decided to drive around.  Close to where I was at, they've been building these odd condos that remind me of San Francisco in a way, and I saw a guy taking pictures.  Ah yes, the competition.

I drove down by the high school and walked around a bit.  There were some flowers down there with some pollenating bees, so I took a few pictures... once again, my poor lens doesn't do macro very well so that was a washout.  No big deal, I guess.

I walked down the road a bit to the soccer field, where a city team was playing.  Now this, I could work with!

After they finished playing, I talked to them about permission to use the images.  Not only were they all for it, but the referee said, "Listen, what you should do is come back with the pictures and sell them to the guys for $5 apiece."  I told him it was a good idea, but of course I'm not going to do it. :)

When their game was over, I went back down by the high school, which is directly across from the levee that protects the town from the river.  I decided to take a walk over there to see what I could find.

I heard blues music coming from the north, but the blues concert I had run into earlier was the south.  When I got to the river, there was some private party going on on some marina across from me.  I wasn't able to take pictures because of the amount of trees and lack of riverbed.

I walked back and there was a large tree stump.  I thought it'd be perfect for a backlit shot.



I'm not entirely happy with it, though, since the ground is so much darker than the upper portion.  I probably won't use it for NYIP Unit 3.

I noticed some birds that kept flying back and forth, so I decided to wait it out for a little while.  This was a good idea.



The bird's beak is obvious in the second shot, but in this small scan it's hard to see.  I also wish I had either a longer lens or an extension tube!  Oh well.

With my light quickly disappearing, and the opportunity for a nighttime Sacramento cityscape quickly approching, I took one last picture in this location... a silly self-portrait.



After leaving the levee, I headed to the other side of town, and quite a ways downstream, where Sacramento is visible.  I was hoping for a nice shot from the West Sacramento side of the river, looking downstream at the city, reflected into the river.  I spent a good 2 hours walking alongside the river, but realized that with the water being high after the recent rains, there's no riverbed any longer!  It's all underwater, including the bottoms of the trees.  The closest I was able to get to the water was still behind the trees, so there was virtually no view of Sacramento to take pictures of.

I also reached an impasse about a mile downstream from the Tower Bridge, so I headed back.  When I was almost at the bridge, someone stopped me, asking me if I was aware of the fact that it was a high explosive area.  NO, I was not!  He asked me where I was headed, and I said well, back where I came from, and pointed.  He said no, because they were about to light off a fireworks display for the Rivercats game, and could I please leave a different way.  He pointed out that different way, and I went on my merry way.

Still... fireworks.  Yeah, fireworks!!!  I spent another 30 to 40 minutes trying to get a good spot to get both the Tower Bridge and the fireworks in the same shot.  I didn't think I could get a picture of the stadium, since the lights were so bright.  Later, I found out they turn off all those lights when the fireworks go off, but that's neither here nor there.

At 10:30pm, the stadium crowd counted down for the fireworks to go off.



Not the greatest location, to be sure, I had to zoom out to 28mm in order to get both in the shot.  I did, however, get the shot, and that's the important thing, right?  I'm going to try and get a better vantage point again sometime, now that I know they have these displays for the games.

My Saturday came to a close and I headed home.  I'm still going to take some more pictures of West Sacramento, since the deadline for the contest is 5pm on May 15th.  Still, out of these pictures, I think the second soccer image will be the one I enter.  I'd love to say I was going to enter the fireworks, but they're just too far from the bridge.  The next time, I'm going to try and get the bridge larger in the frame and the fireworks visible BEHIND it.  We'll see.

I wanted to go out to Beale Falls badly on Saturday, but it had been raining all day Friday and most of the morning Saturday.  The forecast had said it would stop raining by afternoon, so at 2pm, I took my wife and headed out.

My idea was to duplicate the shots I had taken a few weeks ago, but this time, with overcast skies.  That would have been possible, had it not been for the rain.

My valley mind seemed to forget what happens in the mountains (and in this case, foothills) after a large rain.  I got to the locations, but they didn't quite look the same as they had been before.  In fact, I couldn't even get to a few of the locations due to so much water.

I thought it'd be neat to do a side-by-side comparison.  The images on the left are from 4-19-03, the ones on the right from Saturday, 5-3-03.  First up is what was barely a trickle on 4-19, in fact, I didn't post it originally because I thought it was too boring.

What a difference the rain makes!  Next is the actual falls themselves.  There was so much mist from the falls this past Saturday it was incredible.  I had to work fast, and used my skylight filter to minimize the amount of water on my lens.  I took pictures for maybe 5 minutes before deciding to finally give it up.

I did have a lot of fun, though, and this time, my wife came along.  She didn't want to get as close to the edge of the rocks as I did, so she remained a bit up the trail.

Now, the NEXT time I go, I hope there'll be a bit less water!