On the Hill Overlooking Santa Ysabel

I shot this photo last year from the hill that you have to climb when you are hiking the Santa Ysabel Preserve from Highway 79 on the west side.

Santa Ysabel Preserve

I went early on a Sunday morning there for a hike. Here is a photo at the top of the ridge a few miles from Highway 79.

They're creating a staging area off of Highway 78 for this preserve, but it's not open yet. It looks like it will be nice.

Santa Ysabel/Wynola California

This picture was taken in the Santa Ysabel preserve pretty far from Highway 79. I believe I was pretty far into Wynola when this was taken with a Pentax K1000 35mm camera.

B & W Conversion

This is a black and white conversion of one of my digital snapshots. I took the picture last summer near Santa Ysabel. I mostly just used a levels adjustment, contrast adjustment, and conversion to grayscale to make this photo.

Morning Sun

Hi all! Here's another photo from the preserve taken with my 35mm camera. I just purchased (ordered) a Canon Digital Rebel XT today and hope to be taking pictures with it next week.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Shooting into the Sun

I try not to take pictures in any general direction of the sun with my little digital camera. But, I thought it had a nice effect. I did a levels adjustment on the sky to make it a little more dramatic. This was in Santa Ysabel last Sunday morning.

Santa Ysabel Cattle

I visited the Santa Ysabel preserve today. It's fairly new. Though the sign says that it was opened in 2001, it probably has been closed off and on due to fires. Also, I don't think they had signs at the trailhead until about a year ago.

These guys were all over the preserve and many were either on the trail or close-by, so I had to be careful.

Up the road about two miles was a very healthy looking bull near the path.

This is a digital snapshot.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I think I may have posted this 35mm photo before. It's some turkeys near Santa Ysabel that I took in September 2007.

Santa Ysabel in Summer

This is a 35mm photograph of an area where one fire was burning recently, but it may be out by now. This was taken with my Pentax and a 50mm lens.

Santa Ysabel Rain

This is a photo of the large ranch surrounding Santa Ysabel. The fires that we are having started in exact terrain as this. In fact, they started about five miles straight from this location. I took this a couple of months ago when we had a little rain. It never greened up the place, though.

Storm Sky near Lake Henshaw

This photo was taken with my Argus Digital Camera. It was taken last month on Highway 79 near Lake Henshaw in San Diego County.

Happy Cows in California

I shot a photo of these cows near the windmill water pump in Santa Ysabel, CA. I don't know if they're dairy or not. Sometimes, I see their owner riding up and down the range with his dogs checking on things, but I've never met him.

I will be positing an update to my work in progress tomorrow. I don't want to post updates every day because sometimes that changes are so small from day to day that they wouldn't be noticeable.

More of Santa Ysabel

Here's another digital shot of the Santa Ysabel area taken last Thursday.

Where I was today, August 30th, 2007

Today, I went out to take pictures as there were some thunderstorms forming in the mountains. Here's one I took with my Argus camera. It is a digital camera that is fully automatic. I used some digital darkroom techniques to adjust the color and contrast, mostly levels and dodge and burn.

Manipulated Photo, New Sky

This is a 35mm photo that had a very boring, monotonous sky. I went and fixed it up and added a new sky.

Santa Ysabel Storm, Painting in a Day

Hi, here's my acrylic painting in a day. It is 5 x 7 on card stock.