Bay Area Still Has Backroads

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 at the age of 12.  In those days there was a farm at the end of our street, lots of empty lots, orchards, and country roads galore.  When my mom would give people directions to our house, she would jokingly say, "If you think you have left town....keep going.  We are still two miles out."  Since then a lot has changed.  The area resembles the L A Area in Southern California more than any, now, complete with huge traffic jams, smoggy days, and lots of sprawl.  That is why it always surprises me that you can still drive 5 or 10 minutes from my house and be in a country setting complete with a lot of open space, cows, horses, and barns.

Cow Paths

One thing about living in this area, we have a very short "green" season.  The hills around our area are more often golden (as in brown) than green.  The green usually begins sometime in January or February depending on when the rains start.  The hills then stay green for only a few months.  It is by far my favorite time of year and I always feel a yearning to take advantage of the green-ness.  That is why my husband and I took a drive the other day looking for great pictures while the green was new and fresh. 

We decided to leave late in the afternoon, and the light was great for photographs.  The late afternoon sun gives everything a bit of a golden glow, and the contrast between the shadows and the light was phenomenal.  I couldn't resist incorporating it in a few of the pictures.  

 

Along with my love of country and green hills, I have always been fascinated by barns.  I'm not sure when this started, but I think it was sometime shortly after I got my first SLR camera.  I took a picture of a barn somewhere and liked the result.  I think it is really just an offshoot of my fascination with architecture in general.  I love old buildings, farm houses, Victorians, mansions, all sorts of buildings.  But the barns have really been taking first place lately.  The examples below were all found within a 20 minute drive from my house, down a road that is still filled with farms and ranches. 

The best barns are the ones made of wood.  They have such character.  I love the patterns the wood makes, and the different types of wood used.  And the older the barn the more fascinated I am.  

Another vista that has always fascinated me are the areas where you can tell a house used to be, but is no longer.  These areas are usually marked by trees, plants, or walls that are still in existence, even if the buildings are not.  I often find myself wondering what type of house was there and what the people who planted the trees were like.  What type of lives did they lead.  The pictures below came from just that type of place. 

This one reminded me of Little House on the Prarie

Lot's of Character here. 

A closer look at the cow barn

I couldn't resist the flag flying in the background here. 

My photography journey

Originally I was going to use this blog to post photos from a trip that my husband, son, and I took last summer.  It was a 5 week trip that took us 8000 miles through a lot of the US.  Unfortunately, though we took about 5000 photos, there never seemed to be enough time to edit them and post them on the blog.  At this point, I have decided to retool this blog to be about my photos in general.

I have been in love with photography ever since I got my first Brownie Starmite camera when I was about 9 years old.  I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, really, but I did know that I did not want to just take snap shots of friends and family.  I wanted to take "art" shots, whatever that was.  Even in those days, I loved to take pictures of my dolls, or an empty stroller, a stack of records, etc.  Of course, they weren't very good and they usually didn't turn out the way that I had envisioned them in my mind.

Flash forward about 16 years to my college graduation.  My parents got me an Olympus OM-1 SLR which I instantly fell in love with.  I was now able to take more controlled pictures since I could adjust the aperature, f-stop, ISO of the film, etc.  This was much more fun.  The problem here was that film and developing were so expensive that I had to be choosy about what pictures I took.  In addition, the developing process took long enough, that often the picture I wanted was no longer feasible if the first ones did not turn out.  I have to say, though, some of the pictures that I took with this camera are still my favorites.

Then came the advent of the digital camera.  I have decided that I was made for the digital camera.  My first digital was a small palm sized Canon Powershot, which I loved.  It allowed me to take pictures that better approximated what I saw in my head.  The big benefits, though, were that I was able to see the results of the pictures in real time and re-shoot while the subject was still available and I could take hundreds of shots without worrying about the cost of the film or the developing.  The downside was the ability to adjust settings.  While the camera did/does have a manual mode, adjusting the settings was more frustrating than I was able to deal with.  What this camera did, though, was to refuel my love of taking photos, and to allow me to learn more about natural light, setting up the frame, and other aspects of photography without having to worry about the settings.

My current camera is a Canon EOS Rebel DSLR that can either be shot in automatic mode, or can be fully manual.  It is definitely the best of both worlds as it works well when I need to take a quick shot on auto, and equally well when I am playing around, taking numerous shots of the same thing, adjusting everything that I can think of, and just seeing what results.