Santa Barbara

We recently drove up to Santa Barbara. My new tripod got very wet and very dirty. We had to take it apart to get all the sand out of it. Images were taken with a Canon 30D and post-processed with Photomatix and Photoshop.

The Winning Entry

A friend of mine tipped me off to a local photography contest at our library. I checked it out and the theme was "Magical Moments". This photo I took out at Joshua Tree last year immediately came to mind so I printed it out and got it framed and ran down there to submit it at the last minute. I honestly had no expectations of the outcome because I realize that while I'm a pretty decent photographer, there are many out there who are much more talented than I.

Imagine my delighted surprise when I listened to a voicemail announcing me as the 1st place winner in the category I entered. I really was stunned! This is actually the first contest I've ever entered (unless you count a few online contests). Talk about motivating! My next plan is to enter some work into the OC Fair.

Anyways, here's what got me 1st place...

Joshua Tree National Park (part 1) - HDR

This past summer my good friend Rita came to visit me from Sweden (but she's portugeuse!). One of the places we traveled to was Joshua Tree National Park. It's located along the 10 freeway not far from the Arizona border. It's about a 2 hour drive from our home base in Corona, making it a perfect day trip. Going to Joshua Tree is like going to another planet. What always strikes me is the absolute silence of the place. You can't hear a single thing. I really enjoyed this day with Rita! All images were shot in RAW format and converted to HDR using PhotoMatix. Final processing was done in Photoshop CS2.