Way back in May I went home for my cousin's wedding. Well, actually, I went home and then the fam piled in the car and we drove up to Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I'm not the outgoing people photographer that Terry is, but since the bride was my cousin, I felt free to wander around and took more photos than my shy self normally does at weddings. Here are a few I got, just a few months late. Congrats Jackie and Nathan!
Blog
Photo Essay: Vedauwoo
So, since Beth always seems to post a bunch of photographs on here, I thought I'd join her with some of my recent posts from Vedauwoo, WY.
Fields of Flowers
Terry always got mad at me when we lived in Colorado for dragging him along on "wildflower hikes" only to find few, if any, wildflowers and we certainly never whole fields of flowers. He also likes to tell me that all wildflowers are planted by someone. Our trip to Wyoming last month fixed right up. So, here's a little post for him...a reminder of all the wildflowers we found together. I don't think any of these were planted by someone. Goof.
Frustration
Right now I'm supposed to be warming up for a local mountain bike race. But instead I'm at home, eating applesauce and drinking watered-down gatorade. My week has gone something like this...Wednesday evening, pre-registered for mountain bike race, made some stir-fry; wee hours of Thursday morning, started throwing up; more humane early morning hours of Thursday, still throwing up, cursing myself for the meat I used in the stir-fry; mid-morning Thursday, off to clinic to get IV, stopped eating food, stopped throwing up, slept. Friday morning, feeling a little better, tried food again, mixed reviews, but it stayed down, slept more. Saturday morning, getting ready for race, had bagel, stomach not feeling quite right, decided not to go race. Grrr. Its always something. Its probably for the best, but I just want to get a race in down here. So, instead of a race report for today, I'll just throw some black and white photos out. I've been tinkering with a few this week, so here's a sampling. Hopefully I'll have a race report to share very soon.
Grain Bins at Mom and Dad's House
Black-Eyed Susans near home.
Sign buried in the weeds on Little Missouri Trail, Ouachita National Forest, Arkansas.
Photo Essay: Moss Landing
Since this website is called "Welliver Photography" and not "Beth's Lame Bike Race Reports", I figured it was about time we started posting some of our photos. We have a few photo essays in the queue from a few months back, so I'll slowly get them posted here for your viewing pleasure. And if you like our work, don't forget to check out our book! Its currently on sale. During my last week in Monterey we met some good friends at Moss Landing for dinner. Sadly, despite having lived in Monterey for nearly 2 years, I had never snapped a single photo in the picturesque little fishing enclave of Moss Landing. So Terry and I headed up early and wandered around with our cameras to get some photos before dinner. Here's what I found...I'll try to get some of Terry's photos from the same photo walkabout soon!
And the requisite otter shot (this is the only good otter picture I have from Monterey Bay).
Yosemite Gallery
2008 Yosemite Christmas
[svgallery name="yosemite"]
Geeking Out with Big Kitties
While I'm sitting here jamming out to Bruce at half time of some football game (not quite sure if that knee slide across the stage resulting in his crotch all over the camera lens was necessary, but whatever, its Bruce) and waiting for my new batch of satellite data to decode itself, I figured I'd tell a little story about my ride yesterday... Saturdays are always reserved for mountain biking. Usually it involves a fun group ride with the Bella crew, but I awoke in a panic on Saturday morning about how much work I have left to do on my thesis and only 2 months to get 'er done. So I bailed on what was likely a blissful day of single track heaven at Campus and opted for a quick solo spin around the sandy routes of Ft Ord. Solo spin does mean that I can totally geek out and no one can make fun of me, so I strapped on the heart rate monitor (perhaps to make sure I never worked too hard and crossed into zone 4?), turned on the sweet GPS app for my iPhone, and grabbed my camera and off I went. I took a page out of the tri-geek book of secrets and got one of those nutrition box thingies that straps onto my top-tube and perfectly holds my little Canon G10 within reach as I roll along. Since I loathe stuffing my jersey pockets full of crap, this little $15 pouch makes Beth happy.
So I would roll along, swooshing along the trails and pulling out the camera occasionally for a quick snap while I pedaled.
And then I snapped a few more when I stopped at the new lollygagging spot above the old lollygagging spot...
Three hours later, as the ride was winding down and I was on my way back to the car, I got bored and decided to do silly things like try to take pictures of my tire as I rolled and my own shadow. I'll spare you those photos. But while I had the camera out for this little bit of creative silliness, I rounded a corner and saw wildlife up ahead in the trail. A coyote, perhaps? Oooh, no, that looks like a kitty! I rolled to a stop as the very large cat decided to sit down in the trail ahead of me. He's facing away so he can't see me, though I thought he heard me. So now there's a big ass cat in the trail ahead of me and since he sat down, I couldn't see his tail--the easiest way to tell a not-so-threatening bobcat from a potentially not-so-friendly mountain lion.
I stood there, weighing my options, taking a few more pictures, while the cat lies down on the trail and takes a little dust bath. At this point I'm thinking he's not so threatening, so I could just roll by and he might not bother me...but I really didn't want to be on the evening news, so I had to come up with plan B. The route was downhill the other way, so I decided to make noise. The kitty would either be scared and run away into the brush or see me as a tasty treat and run at me, at which point I'd pray that all those standing starts I practiced at the track would get me down the trail faster than the kitty cared to chase. So I picked up and dropped my back tire, the kitty looked at me and then darted into the woods...and as he ran away I could tell it was just a bobcat with a short little tail. Phew.
Oh, now for the geeky part...we found this cool plug-in for Aperture called Maperture that can add a geotag to the EXIF data a photographs. Basically that means that we can add a latitude and longitude to the picture so we know where we took it. But today we discovered that we can take the GPS data from our iPhones and it will match up the location of any photo from any camera as long as the time setting on the camera is the same as the iPhone...how cool is that? So from now on we should be able to tell you exactly where we took every single one of our photos.
Don't expect to see much of me on the blog, Facebook, Twitter, TwitPic, Flickr, or anywhere else for the next few weeks since I'm hammering out some thesis stuff...but I'll leave you with one more picture to hold you over...
We're Published!
So what if I made the book myself. Its out there for the world to see. Our collective best pictures from 2008, as decided by some very stingy judges (okay, yes, we picked them). If you'd like a copy, please go to Blurb or click on the badge on the left-hand side of the screen. And to be serious for a little bit..many of our readers encouraged us and inspired us over the past year (and by many, I mean the five regular readers who drop by here...many is anything over 3). . Now that the book is out there, its a little frighting to think that we've bared our artistic souls for the world to see. This is a step we likely would not have taken without the encouragement, inspiration, and love from our family and friends. Thank you.
And here's to hoping that next year's book kicks this book's ass.
Best of 2008
We were really fortunate to have the opportunity to see a lot of new and different places in 2008, and of course, we went to nearly all these new places with cameras in-tow. Immersing ourselves in these new places and trying to capture exciting/interesting/meaningful images every where we went challenged our creativity while encouraging us to try some new techniques from behind the lens. I feel like we both improved as photographers over the past year, and while we certainly have a long to go and so much to learn as photographers, I think we both are starting to feel confident that we can go out and get at least one good, solid image each time we shoot. We've pooled our best photos from 2008. It was a tough decision since we had so many images from so many different places and experiences. The ten photos below are the "top ten". Over the course of the next few weeks (in between thesis writing) I'll be putting the finishing touches on a book highlighting our all of favorites (roughly 100 images) from the past year...more to come on that later. Now for the top ten, in roughly chronological order:
1. Red Hat. Terry captured this image while waiting for me a mountain bike race.
2. California Poppies. Terry's lovely image from Henry Coe State Park last March.
3. Middle Young Lake at Sunrise. From my late-June solo backpacking adventure to Yosemite.
4. Love Bugs. I happened across these two while hiking back up to the car from the beach somewhere north of Santa Cruz.
5. Aspens in Autumn. I came across these trees not too far from the Big Wood River during my last morning ride in Ketchum, Idaho.
6. View from Hurricane Point. This was one of those days when you almost turn around half way to the intended destination because it seems that the conditions aren't going to cooperate. But we pushed on and I was rewarded with this vista over the Big Sur coast.
7. Green Bird. Terry patiently waited for this guy to pose just right for him. Inside the rainforest exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
8. Butterfly Close-up. Terry loves chasing butterflies with the macro lens. This one is also from inside the rainforest exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
9. El Capitan over Merced River. Terry's capture on the day after Christmas. Absolutely amazing conditions.
10. Deer Run. I had a tough decision trying to pick just one from my Yosemite shots. My first choice was very similar to Terry's shot above, so to add a little variety, I went with the deer in the woods.
Thank you to everyone who has been supportive of our little hobby this year. Hopefully we'll have even better work to show off at the end of 2009.
Vacation of Sorts
Terry and I are on holiday break or winter break or whatever its supposed to be called these days. A little time away from school is nice. But we have stayed incredibly busy. Terry's parents visited from Cheyenne, Wyoming, so we did the whirl-wind tour of the central Cali coast. Here's the quick summary. First we headed down the coast to the south with the ultimate objective of seeing the waterfall at Julia Pfieffer Burns State Park. But of course when you drive down Highway 1 through Big Sur, one tends to stop at every pretty little view of the Pacific. Eventually we did make it down there.
Then we were trying to get back to Carmel for the sunset, but we didn't make it. Instead we stopped at Garrapata State Beach and froze our butts off while shooting one of the best sunsets Terry and I have seen here.
Terry's parents wanted to see a 'cross race while they were here so on Sunday I dragged them all along to the Peak Season series opener at Harbor High. I hated this course last year and was not surprised to see that it was the exact same course this year. But at least this year I didn't feel like I was going to die after 2 laps. I ended up winning while rocking some santa socks. This picture looks a lot muddier than it really was. We got our race in just before the downpour came for the last two men's races.
Of course since we live on the Monterey Peninsula we had to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where Terry and his dad proceeded to photographically document nearly every single fish in the place. The next day we went to San Francisco to check out the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. They have an indoor rain forest with butterflies fluttering around that is pretty cool and an aquarium, too. I would highly recommend not going there on a day when kids are out of school though...it was obscenely crowded! After the museum we wandered around GGP and then went over to the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge before dinner in Chinatown.
On Christmas Day we headed up to Yosemite National Park for a few days. It was snowing pretty hard when we got up there and had to put the chains on...luckily Terry and his dad are some sort of expert chain installers so they went on in a flash and we were off to Yosemite Valley in no time. It was snowing so hard that there weren't many good views, but we did wander through some snow to check out Lower Yosemite Falls.
On the way back from the Falls some deer wandered on to the trail to check us out. They were so comfortable around people; one even licked my hand. We practically had to shoe them out of our way so we could keep moving along. I actually had to zoom out to take this photo.
The next morning the snow had ended and the skies cleared and we were rewarded with bright blue skies over a beautiful winter wonderland. We wandered around checking out all the good viewpoints in the Valley. And everyone bought new boots at the Sport Shop. I swear we should buy stock in Keen Footwear. Or maybe we already hold stock considering the number of pairs of Keen shoes sitting in our closet!
Our last morning in Yosemite we did "photography walk" with a staff member from the Ansel Adams Gallery. I would definitely recommend doing one of these walks if you have the photo bug. Our guide was great and encouraged everyone to shoot in full manual mode and even let us use his filters. We trudged through some thigh-deep snow (good thing everyone bought those new boots) to get an incredible view of Half Dome over the Merced River. It was great! We were really lucky to make it to Yosemite to witness some amazingly beautiful conditions. We're slowing getting our favorite images uploaded to the Flickr page.
That covers most of the highlights. Except for one. Terry's mom had a knack for unknowingly ordering the biggest dish every time we went out to eat. So I had to throw in this photo from our post-race lunch at Sarita's. She ordered a breakfast burrito. Note how its wider than her. She had part of it for lunch and then we all had leftover breakfast burrito the next morning!
Hello Again
I know, I know, no bloggy for awhile. We've had visitors and bike races and trips to the aquarium and photo outings and snow-filled trips to Yosemite. But soon we'll get everyone caught up on our ever-so-exciting lives. In the meantime, enjoy the photo above from Yosemite, taken the day after Christmas which also happened to be the day after what the locals called an epic snowfall.
More pics on our Flickr page.
A Little Project
This year my grandpa was presented with a good opportunity to sell his farm. So he did. And with that, a lifetime of accumulated stuff had to be sorted, sold, given away, hauled off, or thrown out. In true Boyer pack rat fashion, he had a lot of stuff that had to go somewhere as he prepared to move into a much smaller apartment in the local retirement community. Tucked away in drawers here and in closets there were photographic slides. 820 of them. All taken by my grandpa between about 1950 and 1976. Since I used to think that film was way cooler than digital (and I still sort of do, but film is so expensive to work with these days), we have a Nikon SuperCoolScan slide/negative scanner that can scan 50 slides in a batch. So Grandpa sent the slides to me and for the last week, I've been scanning away, converting all 820 slides to digital images. Its been a fascinating journey back in time. Grandpa was head over heels in love with Grandma, so there's lots of pictures of her and even a few from their wedding.
Before they were married, Grandpa was off serving in the Army's Signal Corps during the Korean War. I especially love these photos of military life in another time. His stories that he tells of the river near where he was stationed in Korea, R&R trips to Tokyo, passing through Guam on his way back, the few days of training he spent in Colorado Springs before they shipped out (seeing 1950's downtown CSprings was pretty cool since we lived there for 5 years), all captured forever. And there was even a photo from when they sailed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge on their way back from Korea, with the fog so thick you can barely make out the faint outline of the bridge above. Seeing these images brings all those stories he's told over the years to life.
Of course there were lovely images of my high school sweetheart parents rocking some serious 70's prom fashions too.
And my dad used to be a fairly competitive motocross racer. Sometimes I try to imagine what a badass mountain biker I'd be if he'd stuck with it, but he didn't want his little girls growing up on motorcycles--probably a good move. I just think this picture is sweet...brraapp!
I've selected about 75 of the photos and made a custom hard-bound book for Grandpa for Christmas. I wish I could be there to give it to him, but I'll be here in California and he'll be with the rest of the family in Iowa. But hopefully he'll like it just the same. Grandpa is one of those guys who truly would do anything for anyone--a great person who cares more about every single other person around him than he does about himself. It was a treat to do this for him.
Monday Monday
Mondays always have been and always will be rest days. In college we never had soccer practice on Mondays. When I was in my crazy distance runner phase, Monday was either nothing or, at most, a 2-mile jog. And now that I'm doing this cycling thing, Monday is a day for catching up on homework (yeah, right), going to yoga, and generally putzing around. I didn't even race this weekend, but I still took my Monday rest day. The plan was to go to the local Pacific Grove Farmer's Market and take pics of the fascinating and usually eclectic crowds of a central Cali farmer's market. So I shuffled le ol' Stumpjumper out of the bike pile, put on my Chucks, rolled up my pant legs, and off I went.
Except I forgot that I live in a rather white, upper-middle class enclave of Lexus-driving upper-middle aged women. Pacgrovians don't make for very interesting pictures. But I had my camera and the light was starting to get good, so I decided to pedal around PG and see what I could find. Like trees in the golf course that I ride by every single day but never really notice.
We have a lot of benches in PG. Maybe its because we have so many active old people. They need places to sit every once in awhile. I don't mind though, its nice to watch the waves roll in. Or out. I never really understand what waves are doing.
And the clouds change colors.
And the pelicans fly by.
Then I rolled over to Point Pinos because the sunset looked like it might be nice. Of course I didn't have my tripod, so I had to improvise. I found yet another trusty park bench, leaned the bike against it and some how got the monster long stem and silly old school shifters to perfectly balance my sort of expensive camera (shhh, don't tell Terry). I think it worked out.
Luckily I had my light to get home and only one deer ran in front of me. Oh, and I looove my fabulous new Sheila Moon hat.
Sunset Shooting
The crickets are chirping in the greater blogosphere and I needed a spreadsheet break, so I'm blogging for no reason other than to do something other than work on my thesis. Plus I want to see if I can insert a video into the new bloggy. [flickr video=3040556270]
Last night I went to the beach down the street to shoot the sunset. The sunset on Sunday night was freakin' amazing, and of course, we had no cameras and weren't in a good spot to even try to get a shot with our lame camera phones. So Monday afternoon rolled around and I was hoping that the sunset would be good again. Of course two unbelievably spectacular sunsets in a row is pretty unlikely, but a girl's gotta hope, right? So I went to Asilomar State Beach, took a bajillion photos and none of them were particularly striking. I was sitting at home, staring at a screen of those bajillion thumbnails of the sunset and couldn't find one that was any better than the others. I started mindlessly scrolling back and forth through the photos and it was a little like I was watching the sunset and the waves roll by. Thus, I decided to make a movie by putting all the frames together. Hopefully my crooked horizons and moving tripod spots aren't too nausiating.
Ninety minutes worth of shooting and 52 images all rolled into 12 seconds of video.
This video, along with a few other photos I shot last night can be found on our Flickr account.
Rest Week
This week is a training rest week. I tend to stretch the definition of "rest" week and sometimes get a little lazy. But that also keeps me from taking myself to seriously...and often it takes a whole week of not being serious to have an impact. So this morning I dropped Terry off at school and then headed to Ft Ord for an early morning ride. It was supposed to be a sprint workout--my favorite--but it didn't happen.
See, before I left the car I grabbed my little point and shoot camera and dropped it in the jersey pocket. And since I had it with me, I just had to use it. First I went to the fishing hole...
But I don't think there's been any fishies there for awhile. Then I cruised over to the old shooting range. No one has been shooting there for awhile either, but some pretty things grow there now...
Then I saw some art someone decided to add to the side of the building. Or at least someone thought it was art. Others likely have a different opinion...
And then there was an open door on the other side of the building. Why is it that you always look in an open door when passing by? Inside, light was streaming through a long-gone window...
All that to say I didn't really do my workout today. And I didn't mind at all.
Note: You can click on the photos to see them a bit bigger, and while you're looking at them nice and big, moving your mouse over the left or right hand side of the image will bring up an arrow so you can scroll through all the images in this post. A couple of these photos were edited with some photo-editing software called Color Efex Pro 3.0 by Nik Software. We are doing the 15-day free trial of it to see if it will be our Christmas present to ourselves.
Polaroiding
A few weeks ago Terry downloaded this fun little plug-in called Poladroid. All you have to do is drag and drop a photo onto the Polaroid camera icon and the process starts, just like an old school Polaroid. First an image pops up with a brown square on it. Then slowly over the next few minutes the image slowly "develops" and about 5 minutes later, you have an image that looks just like what would have come out of the instant camera. Don't feel like waiting 5 minutes? Click on the image and you can actually "shake it like a polaroid picture" by moving your mouse around and the picture actual develops faster! And you can set the preferences to put fingerprints on the border or to put dust on the pic. Its pretty cool. Unfortunately the Windows version isn't out yet...rumored to come out some time this month. Here are a few samples...Terry has more, including some cool ones from Surf City, but he and his computer with all of his pictures are at school right now.
And ultimately the point of this post was to see if I could post more than one image in the new blog...it was a pain in the old one.
Bonus Terry pic...because he's so cute.
