Sunday, January 1, 2012
Alice Keck New Years Day

Ahh winter in Santa Barbara! This is from an evening walk on New Years day through Alice Keck Parks' Park (Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens).

Saturday, December 31, 2011
Sandpiper Lake Sunset

Sunset at Sandpiper Golfcourse in Goleta California. This little duck pond (or water hazard to the golfers out there) is one of the most beautiful places to watch the Sunset in the Santa Barbara area. The sounds at this time of day are amazing. You are over a hill from the roads and populated areas with so many frogs and ducks that it seems like you are far away from civilization. Although I have never spent enough time to get hooked myself, from this point of view I can really understand the attraction of golf.

Sunday, December 11, 2011
Santa Barbara Sunset from Butterfly Beach

The end of a beautiful Santa Barbara day as seen from the west end of Butterfly Beach in Montecito. The lights across the water are at the beach in Santa Barbara.

Monday, November 14, 2011
Sandpiper Golf Course Time Lapse Sunset

The Sandpiper Golf Course is fast becoming one of my favorite sunset spots. And I especially like the duck pond (aka water hazard). What better location to try some new techniques for some interesting time lapse shots. If you are going to stand around for a half hour with your camera watching the world go by this is surely one of the best places to do it.

Sunday, May 22, 2011
Winter Sunset

Watching the sunsets here really makes you aware of the drastic changes in the position of the sun through the seasons. This time of year the sun would already be over the hills at the right. This shot was one I had almost overlooked in a collection of early January images. It is actually part of a much bigger panorama. But looking closer I found the person standing in the surf watching the sunset which I thought made it much more interesting.

Sunday, April 17, 2011
Agapanthus in the Morning Rain

Friends and family who live in a "less temperate" climate make fun of me when I mention the different seasons here, but I do love the change in our seasons. This is a fun early spring shot. The Agapanthus are just starting to bloom in our yard, and on this day an early morning rainstorm had just subsided to let the sunlight through. This combination of weather and sunlight can capture my attention for hours without even leaving my front yard. I actually had to tiptoe through the wet flowers to frame up the second blossom (or inflorescence), out of focus in the background.

Thursday, August 12, 2010
Starry Night Over Butterfly Beach

This is an extremely long exposure just after dark at Butterfly Beach. Even by moonlight our beaches are beautiful, but most of the details of the rocks and the sand were not even visible to the naked eye.

Friday, June 4, 2010
Romantic Santa Barbara

Sometimes you plan an image. Sometimes it takes months or even years to get exactly what you're looking for. Then there are the times that in the blink of an eye everything comes together. Just at this moment, the couple strolling on the beach turned to look at the spectacular clouds. A second earlier they were indistinguishable, walking so closely together. And a few short seconds later the waves had moved in, obscuring their silhouettes and hiding their reflections in the sand.

Saturday, February 20, 2010
East Beach Sunset

The winter sunsets are always beautiful in Santa Barbara. But once in a while there is a particularly amazing evening. This was one of those evenings.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010
UCSB Starry Night

Walking at sunset around the campus of UCSB during a holiday break I thought I might find everything too quiet to get the photos I was looking for. But like any small city, there is always something going on there. I was happy to see some lights in the windows and the beautiful landscape lighting still on. This image was the last of the evening and one of my favorites.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Butterfly Beach Stone Wall Sunset Landscape

We're having a wonderful run of beautiful sunsets right now. But this is actually from a beautiful evening walk along Butterfly Beach back in October. I had a request to use the image, but they needed a horizontal layout. Fortunately I usually shoot both horizontal and vertical if I can frame a nice composition both ways for just this reason.

Sunday, January 10, 2010
Montecito Sunset

Yesterday was a bit overcast during the day. We had some things to do around town and later in the day found ourselves in a beautiful little nursury in Carpenteria. As the sun was getting low it started to break through the clouds so we found a nice spot in the Montecito hills on the way home to watch the show. What followed was one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen. It was truly one of those times you wish you had your camera! Fortunately I did!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Shipwrecked After Dark on Butterfly Beach

The clouds were beautiful the other evening at Butterfly beach. Just after sunset they looked almost like an aurora. This was an extremely long exposure, the last of a particularly beautiful day.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sunset over Santa Barbara from Butterfly Beach

If you've looked around my sites much you probably already know that Butterfly Beach is my favorite beach in Santa Barbara. It's a beautiful place to wander and relax. Sunset is my favorite time, it's always beautiful, but Sunday (the day this was taken) was something truly special!

Friday, October 23, 2009
Nojoqui Falls Rock Shelter

This little cave-like formation is common at the bottom of a waterfall. The churning of the water easily erodes the rock more quickly than the falling water down the face of the waterfall. I would imagine it would be a much more violent and dangerous place in the middle of a rain storm. But I'll bet it's a spectacular sight!

Monday, July 20, 2009
Stearns Wharf Sunset

Click the main image for a larger view.

Last Friday was a beautiful day to sit and watch the clouds. They really catch my attention this time of year since we usually don't have many of them. I took the opportunity to wander out on the wharf where I could get a wide open view of the evening sky. It was a perfect start for a relxing weekend!

Sunday, February 15, 2009
Santa Barbara Harbor Sailboats

Whenever I feel like wandering around aimlessly with my camera the Harbor is one of my favorite spots for a stroll. This was an image I took a couple of months ago around the same time I shot a massive panorama of the harbor. Sometimes the individual images wait around until I get all the huge projects done. It's times like now that I enjoy going back and seeing what else I may have missed. Especially because I have a bit of a cold so I thought better of running around in the cool weather with my camera this weekend. I have to get healthy since we are supposed to have the storm to end all storms sometime starting in the next day or so and I want to be well enough to go play in the snow. It's really important to never grow up too much!

Sunday, February 1, 2009
Secluded Cove

Today we took a drive down Highway 1 to look for a place called Jade cove. It is always a beautiful drive and we usually stop at various parks in Big Sur but this time we found everything on the east side of Highway 1 closed. They had some massive fires last year and they still have not reopened the parks.

Luckily all the vista points on the beach side were still open. This is just south of Big Sur at a vista point looking south along the coast.

Probably good we did not stop that often anyway, Jade cove was a lot further than we expected, almost twenty miles further. And if you have ever been on Highway 1, twenty miles can be a long way especially this time of year when they are just barely keeping parts of it passable.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Stearns Wharf in the Distance

This is the shot I was looking for when I got yesterday's photo of the day. Well sort of anyway. I was thinking this might be a nice angle a little later in the evening once the lights are on in the buildings on Stearns Wharf. Maybe next time I'll get out there a little later. And as I type this the evening news is calling for more clouds next week. I better start making some space on my hard drive for more photos!

Monday, January 26, 2009
SBCC Stearns Wharf View

Saturday was a beautiful day. We had the opportunity to wander around and enjoy the sunset. Which is one of the things I like to do as much as possible this time of year. This was the view from Santa Barbara City College just a bit before sunset. Sometimes my images are totally controlled and I have a plan for exactly what I'm looking for. In this case I stared with a shot from the pathway that you see. The streetlights were not very interesting looking. But after I got what I was looking for I took a walk around to see what I might be missing. I thought the path looked nice so I got a few shots, but even then I did not notice that the lights were already on. It was only after I got home and looked through the pictures that I saw the glow in the lights and decided this was one of my favorite images.

Sunday, January 25, 2009
High Speed Fountain

Today was a day of relaxation. Well, after the morning of spring cleaning it was anyway. (Yeah, spring comes early in California and it's not always a good thing.) One of our stops today was at Terra Sol Nursery on Patterson Avenue. We spend a LOT of time there for people who live in a place with a 10' x 25' back yard. But there is always room for one more plant. And there is always room for quite a few more cool plant photos.

We were trying to think of something nice to put in a newly cleaned space hoping it would discourage us from collecting junk... er, I mean, important things that have yet to find a permanent home. Today it was the fountains that caught our eyes. But those are more of an outside thing so we left uncharacteristically empty handed. Well other than for a few really cool shots of the water flowing from the fountains. This one is particularly interesting because just looking at the fountain the stream was a perfect column of water. But at 1/640th of a second you can clearly see individual pulses of the motor driving the pump. Usually the pumps pulse at 60hz (60 times per second) same as the electricity that supplies them.

In the spirit of simplifying things, and since the photo of the day has been a little behind lately, I have created a new category on the site: "unretouched". This image is just as it came out of the camera. Not to say that all the other images are heavily altered. But I am far from a purist when it comes to either recreating the scene as I remember it, or just having fun with a creative image. And recently I have been working with some massive panoramas that take days to get just right. So it will be nice to take some more spontaneous shots.

Sunday, December 28, 2008
Pacific Grove Sunset

This is from a couple of nights ago. It was a beautiful evening. Of course right at this very spot the wind was almost strong enough to knock me over at one point. But it was still very beautiful. I'm posing it a bit late (it's not actually the 28th anymore I know!) but I do have a bunch of trip shots to get online. Unfortunately the trip was too short with too many cool things to do. With a couple of projects going now that we are back in town, I'm keeping my system busy processing photos. But I'll get new things online as fast as possible.

Saturday, December 27, 2008
Monterey Wave

Yesterday was a fun day. We ate good food and cruised around Monterey. There was just enough wind to make the waves interesting. But not enough to make you feel like you were going to have your skin removed if you stood outside for more than a minute. That's the way it's been in the past when we have been there. A couple of years ago they even lost some trees and had other serious trouble.

Monday, November 3, 2008
Santa Barbara Lights

Click the main image for a larger view.

This is the third and last shot from our walk on the breakwater the other evening. (Actually it's 48 shots but who's counting?)

It was an amazingly beautiful evening. And I was happy to get out to the breakwater this late since I have been pondering a shot like this for a while.

If you would like a quick tour of our beautiful home, read on... The water on the left is the inside of the Harbor. The buildings from yesterday's photo of the day and the day before are just on the other side of the harbor at the left. You can see the tall white flood lights of the Santa Barbara City College field. The field of view in this image is 248° so the flags that you see at the left and the very right are acutally (more or less) in a straight line. Straight out the rock breakwater in the middle of the shot is the entrance to the harbor. And, some of the bright lights on the other side of the entrance are along Stearn's Wharf. The large bright white light further to the right is another ball field. The glow going up the mountain is the lights of the city, and you can see our evening fog rolling in especially at the right over the bright white light.