Point Reyes National Seashore

Point Reyes National Seashore is a gem. About an hour drive from Santa Rosa at the end of a drive through some very beautiful landscapes lies a treasure chest of wild life photography opportunities. On Thanksgiving, Jan and I packed cranberry and turkey sandwiches and headed there for a walk and a picnic. I, of course, took my camera gear.

A good friend and I once hired a photography guide to help us find bobcats at Point Reyes. While we did find some badgers, we did not see one bobcat. On subsequent excursions I had seen them but always at a distance and they being very wary of humans would disappear quickly. On this lovely Thanksgiving Day, here was a young bobcat hunting along the road. He showed no concern about our presence and kept right on hunting.

On our walk I couldn't pass up this white crowned sparrow feasting.

And a bit later this northern harrier leaving its perch. As a side note, there is a phenomenon that happens frequently at Point Reyes, about mid morning, when the camera will not focus a super sharp image. It has to do with atmospherics and I have encountered it a few times there. This image has a soft focus partly due to the atmospherics and partly due to shooting too slow of a shutter speed. This shot was taken at 1/800 sec and should have been twice that speed.

As we were headed down to North Beach to have lunch and watch the waves, we encountered these two coyotes. The one on the right was hunting by itself and then the other came running up. They were very chummy and cavorted on the hillside for quite a while. A real treat to see as usually they are very serious, down to business hunters. All in all it was a wonderful day at Point Reyes and a great way to spend a holiday.

Art Display At The Center For Spiritual Living, Santa Rosa

The Center for Spiritual Living Santa Rosa, has a wonderful program that encourages artist members to display their work. The work is hung in the Social Hall and typically has about twenty pieces hanging for two months at a time. On March 1rst I will be hanging several images taken in Iceland, along with some wildlife images, including foxes, coyotes, eagles and kites. I will also have some paintings by my mother and two of my own. I am pretty excited about this showing. One of the pictures I will have in the show is of Godafoss, a beautiful waterfall in Iceland. When I first saw pictures of this waterfall I knew I wanted to go to Iceland to take pictures of it. This composition required gettin into some very cold water.

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The Aurora Borealis, May 10, 2024

This last May, my wife, Jan, and I were on vacation in the San Juan Islands, WA. We were there for a week staying at the Trumpeter Inn, a B&B on San Juan Island. Mid way through our stay we heard there was to be a Northern Lights display and that we would likely be able to see it since we were at a latitude just north of Victoria, BC. The excitement was immediate. The conditions were just right as the sky was cloudless and the moon was in its crescent phase and would be low on the horizon (and therefore not overly bright) during the expected good viewing time between 10 pm and 2 am. The image above was taken that night and is what I was expecting to see, a green Aurora. Little did we know what was to come! Early on the was the first hint that something special was about to happen as color in addition to green began to show. I found this very exciting as I had seen green auroras before but never one with the purple/blue colors an...

Notes To My Mother

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