In Mountain View for the week
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:02:44 GMT
I’m in Mountain View this week for a few meetings, and my social calendar is pretty empty. Is anything happening this week?
Life on the road
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:31:11 GMT
My stint with Google in California is finally complete, and I’m working my way back home. Of course, I’m not exactly doing it in the most direct manner possible–instead of flying back, we’re doing the Big Family Road Trip.
Sophia and Gabe at San Juan Capistrano
My wife’s sister lives in San Diego, so my wife and kids drove down last week to see her. They stopped for the night in Mountain View, and then we all drove down to San Diego together for the long weekend. We took the kids to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and then I drove back to Mountain View for my last week. It’s a fun drive, all 470 miles worth, through LA’s rush hour. It took me 9:45 to get home.
Then, after a few days’ work, I took Friday off this week and drove down to San Diego for a couple days on the beach with everyone. We took the kids to see Capistrano, and then took off yesterday morning for home. We stopped in Sacramento last night; according to Google, we have around 760 miles to go.
The Golden Gate Bridge
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 09 Jan 2006 06:12:38 GMT
I did a bit more shooting today. I’m going to spend more time processing today’s shots then normal, because I shot mostly panoramas. Here’s the first one, of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge from one of the overlooks on the Marin Highlands road.
The Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco
This one started life as 11 JPEGs; the full version on Flickr is 9902x2615. I’ll probably order a big print of this, if I can find someplace decent that’ll print 30+ inch panoramas for a reasonable price. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions.
Big Sur and Piedras Blancas
Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:36:00 GMT
Over the past five years, my view on traveling has shifted; before I really took up photography as a hobby, sightseeing was something that I did for fun, and took pictures to document the sightseeing so I could remember things better and share the trip with others. Now, sightseeing is purely an excuse to go someplace new and take pictures.
So, between November and December, I spent over three weeks in California. How many pictures did I take? None at all, because my camera’s shutter died at the end of October, and I delayed sending the camera back to Canon for repairs until after my first paycheck, just to make sure that I could actually afford the bill.
As usual, Canon surprised me; the repair charge was about half of what I’d expected, and they got the camera back in my hands just in time for me to fly back to California last week. So, yesterday was my first day off of work in California with a working camera. It’s a big state, and I had a hard time deciding where to start, but in the end I decided to drive down the coast a bit and see how it went, without any real plan. In the end, I ended up driving from Mountain View down to Santa Cruz, then along the coast to Monterey, through Carmel, along the Big Sur coast all the way down to San Luis Obispo, CA. All told, I put around 400 miles on the car yesterday and took around 250 pictures. I would have taken more, but the light was bad for the first half of the trip, and then as soon as the light started getting good, my battery died. I left my spare battery in Washington, oops.
Still, I ended up with a few decent pictures of the land and the sea:
Just south of Carmel, CA
The waves were big; the rock in the middle was around 15 feet tall.
You can’t visit Big Sur and not come back with a picture like this…
…or this
The best part of the drive was Piedras Blancas beach, just north of San Simeon. I was driving along and noticed the nice sandy beach out of the corner of my eye, and wondered what geologic process produced a beach with so many big, round rocks:
Oh, wait–those aren’t rocks, they’re Elephant Seals. Piedras Blancas has developed a huge Elephant Seal colony over the past 15 years; the first pup was born there in 1992; now they estimate that there are nearly 2,000 pups born there every year. The pups look kind of like this:
Baby elephant seal and mother
January is birthing and mating season, all wrapped up in one.
Sleeping, covered in sand
Dominance games
Unfortunately, my battery died about halfway through Piedras Blancas, so I didn’t have a chance to get a shot of the whole beach with hundreds of seals, or any pictures of the rest of San Luis Obispo County, with its rolling hills and massive volcanic stone outcroppings. I’ll probably do the drive again in early February and concentrate on the south half of the coast.
Arrived in California
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:52:17 GMT
I have arrived! I’m in Mountain View now, and will be for about 4 weeks. Hopefully I’ll have time to post a bit more after I’ve tracked down dinner.
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