Just Messing Around

A couple of my coworkers wanted to learn how to use their DSLRs so I took them back behind UCI and shot around one of my favorite areas. Here are the results from "lessons" about aperture, ISO, shutter speed, depth of field, and composure.

Muir Woods Hike

Just drove up to SF with Jenny Phamtastic to visit my good friend, Noah Cho.  He took us out on a hike in Muir Woods, really stunning place.  Apparently everyone in San Fransisco thought so too, we had to park on the street and walk for about 30 mins to get to the place, it was so crowded.  Can definitely see why, though - it was pretty incredible.

Kept hearing about this "junction"

Moss pretty much covered every tree

Furry

Found a few banana slugs

Here's a youtube of the banana slug munching on that clover: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvb0tg6khq0 Aseem was feeling malicious, apparently.

We found a lot of "zen" rock piles as well

Ladybugs seemed to be attracted to them

Aseem, Jenny, and Noah being as anonymous as possible

Twisty tree

Thought this looked interesting

All in all, a great hike - was the perfect temperature too.  Can't believe it's around 60 degrees in SF during August, but makes for great hiking with zero sweat.

O'Neil Park - or the Attack of the Ticks

A few weeks back, Anha and I took a trip out near my hood to O'Neil Park to try to find some waterfalls.  Well, it turns out you need rain for water, so that didn't work out, but we decided to take a hike and see if we found anything interesting.  We decided on the most gruelingly-named hike on the map - "Edna."

Here are the results:

There were a few of these weird seed pods...I'm gonna call them...  on the ground looked like dried up sponges.

Ah, Anha Nguyen, my partner in crime on  most of my photographic exploits - this is her  sporting her "hiking boots"

Thought this was a interesting contrast in texture and color

Over what seemed to be an endless hill was Rancho Santa Margarita

The only thing significant about this picture is that it was about this  moment that I realized it would be a good idea to start checking for ticks.   I think at first glance, I had 7 on my pants.

Shockingly, no lighting effects were added to this photo, that's actually the  sun behind it.

I was shocked that I got a pretty decent and sharp image of the moon in the  sky.  I upped all the blacks in the image above so you could see it better,  but it was still faintly daylight at the time I shot this.

So at this point I started playing around with the HD video in the 7D -  you'd be surprised how creepy it looks to watch a caterpillar munch  on a flower in slow motion.  Those things are pretty ugly.

Feeling rather proud of myself for having made it  through the wilderness, unscathed (aside from  having been attacked by probably 2 dozen ticks),  we called it a night and went back to my place to  check the pictures.  It was then that I realized I  hadn't removed ALL the ticks yet.  Sigh.