Tag: wildlife
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At the Zoo
2017 was not a good year for photography and me. The reasons were all over the map. Rainy days keeping me indoors during the winter, outrageous heat doing the same in spring and summer. The allure (read: guilt) of long-neglected projects keeping me close to home, the feeling that I’d mined local opportunities for photos…
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The Birds and the Beasts of El Niño
Meteorologists have been promising drought-stricken California an El Niño event since sometime in 2014. That year the rising temperature of Pacific Ocean waters characteristic of the phenomenon came too little, too late to combat the Pacific “blob,” a new and puzzling region of unusually warm water and its associated high pressure system that kept storms…
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A Walk in the Tiny Woods
The first time I drove from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo I was in my late twenties. A college boyfriend had graduated and decamped to Cal Poly for a masters degree, and despite it being the time before smartphones and Skype shrank emotional if not physical miles, we embarked on the folly of a…
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The Old Sky
According to the Yanomami people, the world before this one was crushed when forces of chaos collapsed the sky, hurling Earth’s inhabitants into the underworld. Kinder deities raised a new one, and from the back of its fallen predecessor grew the forest where, when they clawed their way back above ground, the Yanomami came to…
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Lessons Learned on the Cambria Boardwalk
A morning in Cambria and a mere 383 photos later, I have made certain additional discoveries. Lessons Technical Lessons Natural I keep dreaming of taking pictures at the Cambria Scarecrow Festival. Which was, in fact, this weekend. But first I would have to get over expecting scarecrows and finding only papier mache. Trying out my…
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Thunderbird
The first time I saw a turkey vulture I thought it was an eagle. It soared along a ridge, far too large to be a hawk, elegant and majestic as it rode a thermal nearly out of sight. When my friend said it was a vulture I didn’t believe him. The first time I heard…
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The Wild Things
When my grandparents were still alive they lived in the remote Pennsylvania woodlands in a small stucco and stone home that my grandfather built himself. I spent a summer there just before my teens. I remember wandering through my grandmother’s garden of dahlias and snapdragons, mesmerized by all the color. I remember afternoons spent curled…
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Faces of Monterey
Monterey always catches me a little off guard when I visit. Growing up in Southern California I was accustomed to beach grunge chic: wind and salt and the scouring sands made a pristine exterior out of reach for even the most dedicated (and wealthy) residents and merchants. Beachside buildings were always a little bit dirty,…
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Birds, Water, and Lazy Weekends
As my SmugMug galleries can attest, I love taking photos of birds. So when Skip’s boss loaned us his telephoto lens my first thought was to head out to Atascadero Lake and its teeming flocks of ducks and geese and grebes, with the occasional swan drifting elegantly among them, to see what I could see.…
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Being Candid
Sometimes I wish I enjoyed photographing landscapes more. They’re so blessedly…stationary. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of children and wildlife during even my short tenure behind a camera, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to capture them in their natural state. One tends to run towards you, the other away. I…
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