Film?

Yesterday I developed some film from our trip to Colorado. Film? You ask. Well, yes. I picked up a Canon EOS-1N off ebay for $135. Couldn't pass it up. Actually, it has me on a bit of film kick. No time to explain right now, but it does. Here's a couple of pics, starting with our climb of 14,154' (+/- by GPS) Mount Democrat. We are at about 13,000 feet here:



Lori and Cookie made it look easy. Lori had been experiencing some issues with the altitude as we acclimated for our Pikes Peak Ascent race. She was good to go on this day though. Cookie said "Altitude? What altitude?".

Here's a hot shot of my fiance in Utah on our way home...


Gotta love that!

Tonight we did a short hike up Mt. Tam on Matt Davis as the sun set. This picture is from my G9 on ISO 800 so it's pretty grainy:



It was a beautiful sunset.

Spare the air today.

Today was a "spare the air" day in the Bay Area, so I decided to ride Eddy to work. He was good with that. You can see some of the temperature inversion-trapped smog in the photo of San Francisco. It was 72 degrees this morning when I left the house, and 79 degrees on the top of Mount Tam.

It was actually quite an eventful commute. It started with a bunch of turkeys jamming up the road. Can you believe the nerve of those guys (and gals)?

Then there was the spider web...

and a coyote...

and some deer -- here seen jumping into the Pacific ocean.

And finally, a quick shot of Alpine Lake.

As I rolled off the Mountain into Fairfax, a series of three cars rushed to turn left in front of me. The first two had enough time, the third one would have sent me to the hospital. He crossed the yellow line, braked, and then managed to get back on his side before I went by at about 20mph. He was almost as scared as I was -- but you had to be on my side of the action to know fear for your life. Ah well, all in a day's commute, eh?

It's Lunchtime, Let's Ride!

I rode Eddy out to Nicasio during lunch today. It was pretty warm, 80ish I would guess, and there was a bit of breeze. It's such a beautiful ride though.

I thought I saw Luke over at the Skywalker Ranch, but he was gone before I got my camera out. I did manage to take a few photos in Nicasio.

Since I have been shooting film with my 6x6 medium format camera, I have been trying to think in that format. So, I cropped these pictures from my Canon G9 to a square. It's an interesting picture size.

In the church picture, I particularly liked the steeple and steeple shadow combination. Without the shadow, you wouldn't even know there was a cross on the steeple. Cool.

More Gold

Here are two more of the pictures from last Friday's trip to the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see it got very foggy, but it was not a total loss. Enjoy!

Ranching in Paradise

We visited with friends near Middletown, CA. They have a ranch that has been in their family for over 40 years. Gorgeous views, a nice breeze, no road noise, and room to roam. Lori and I love to visit there. We had dinner with our friends on Saturday night, and then they had to head home. We stayed one more night and marveled at the stars and the coyotes. Cookie figured she could take the coyotes, but opted to stay in bed with us -- she is very smart.


My best friend also has a house on a lake near there. We were able to meet up with them for a couple of hours too. I wish they lived closer to us. Next door in the house that is coming up for sale would be good... It's actually closer for us to visit with them at their lake house than it is to go to their actual house in Newark. Only one tank of gas as far as I can tell. If that doesn't make sense to you, then it probably wasn't FOR you! ;-)

Golden at the Gate -- Not Friday

This will be my first email post. I hope it works well. Hmm... not as well as I would like. I'll have to do some more research.

On Friday I took the day off to take care of some errands. But before all of that, I got up early to shoot the sunrise at the Golden Gate Bridge. Shortly after arriving at my chosen location, I was engulfed in fog. A few clear patches broke through over the next hour, but not really enough to get the shot I wanted. Here are a couple I did get…

The first is a picture of one of the historic bunker sites used to protect the SF bay in a bygone era…. I hope it doesn’t’ get reactivated to keep the Russians uninterested in our country,

I also saw a deer while I was there…

I’ll try to post a few more pictures this next week. C U then.