We left Yosemite Thursday Morning. It was a late start, not getting off until
11:10 AM. But first, let me backup to
Tuesday afternoon and my 4-hour “Walking in the Footsteps of Ansel Adams”. I showed up at the Ansel Adams Gallery in
Yosemite Village a little before 1 PM in order to sign the required waiver. I didn’t bother to read it as it may have
given me cause for concern. I wanted to
do this and that meant signing the waiver.
Christine, one of the Gallery’s professional photographers, led the
group, 6 Ansel Adams wanna-be’s.
Christine started talking and walking at the same time. She never stopped talking and rarely stopped
walking. Don’t get me wrong,
though. She was giving us some very good
information on manual cameral settings, composition, use of filters, and
discussing the work of Ansel Adams. The
only times that we stopped was for her to show us places from which Adams took
some of his famous photographs. She
helped us set up the shots and then briefly critiqued them to help us get
better shots. I’m afraid that Ansel will
get no competition from any of us. Of
course, it took him more than 4 hours to take almost any single photograph. He would do a lot of walking around at
different times of the day and year, looking at how and where the light was
illuminating potential subjects. Once he
had taken the shot(s) he still had a lot of work to do in the darkroom to get
exactly the print he wanted (no digital cameras or Photoshop back then!) By the time 5 PM arrived we had walked
several miles, I was tired, my feet were killing me (wrong kind of shoes), and
we were still almost a mile from the parking lot where I was to meet Carol Ann
and the car.
Although the afternoon was quite tough, I enjoyed it and
picked up some excellent tips and pointers.
I would recommend the experience to anyone wishing to improve their
photography, whether you have a DSLR or a point-and-shoot camera (2 of the
group had point-and-shoots and Christine showed them how to use features on the
cameras that they were not familiar with).
Bruce and Karen left Yosemite on Wednesday, heading back to
Paso Robles, CA. The rest of us would
use Wednesday as a day of rest and preparing to leave Yosemite. Gunther and Candace were heading down to San
Jose and environs and then would be visiting Bruce and Karen in Paso Robles for
a few days.
Carol Ann and I headed for Paso Robles from Yosemite. Bruce and Karen drove us over the coast (only
about 25 miles from Paso Robles) yesterday.
We drove up and down the Pacific Coast Highway (CA 1) from San Simeon to
Cambria.
We stopped at the Hearst Castle Visitor Center to look into
possible tours (for which we MAY return tomorrow (Sunday) morning. The castle sat on a hill in fog a couple of
miles from the Visitor Center. A short
distance north of Hearst Castle we pulled over and parked at an elephant seal
viewing area. They return every year to
this particular beach for giving birth to their pups and laze away the days
sleeping in the sand when they aren’t out grabbing a meal. There can be as many as 8,500 of these very
large seals calling this beach home. Not
that many were there yesterday, but there were still hundreds of them. Last year there were over 4,000 new pups
born.
We drove down to Cambria and had lunch at a restaurant
called Schooner’s. We ate on the deck
overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I should
have worn a hat as my forehead got a little sunburned.
Today is Saturday. It
is almost noon and I am waiting for Carol Ann to return from shopping with
Karen so the four of us can go to the Double Barrel Brewery, a micro-brewery
and brewpub for lunch (and samples of their various beers, of course). After lunch we hope to catch at least the
second half of the Georgia – Tennessee SEC football game on TV. It starts at 3:30 PM Eastern time, which is
12:30 PM here in California.
Tomorrow the four of us plan to visit some of the local
wineries and sample their wines. There
are somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 or more wineries in the Paso Robles
area. Grape vines seem to be everywhere.
I have made a bold attempt to sort through the hundreds of
photos taken since I last posted any on this blog. I will include them with this post, as it
will make the page too long. I will
create a photo page (see list of pages in the right-hand column) for you to
browse through at your leisure.
1 comment :
Adams excelled in contrast and saturation. For every hour he spent in the field, he spent about ten in the darkroom. I hope you are experimenting in black and white. There are several ways to do this, the simplest being pressing one button in Picasa. I downloaded a B&W add on to Photoshop and have done a lot of experimenting but after the wedding I converted a lot of photos of the bride by simply using Picasa. It is always better to take a full color photo with your camera and then create a black & white version of it that to use a "B&W" setting in the camera. Have fun!
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