Fountains of Wayne in San Diego
Fountains of Wayne is an excellent group out of New York City. Now they are not your hippest NYC band given that they were formed in 1996, but there list of awesome songs and original material is impressive. I started to listen to them in 1999, after there initial album release and I have always considered them some of the most talented song-writers in the industry. Lucky me as I discovered that they were playing at Anthology in San Diego last night. I scooped up two tickets and saw one of the best shows of my life. It was a great night. I like photographing live shows but it is actually a bit difficult. The lighting keeps changing and you are often limited to pictures based on where you are seated. From my experience it is always best to bring your longest lens because the closer the better as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately I didn’t heed my own advice and only brought a lens focal length to 85MM which isn’t enough even when you are sitting close. In any case, a great show and a great band.
http://www.frankiefoto.com/Music/Fountains-of-Wayne/19496766_sLJ4dj
Scripps Pier at Sunset
One of the most beautiful places in San Diego is Scripps Pier in La Jolla at Sunset. If you have not had a chance to experience you should. Take a short walk north along La Jolla Shores about 1 hour before Sunset and watch the birds, surfers and other people strolling along the shore enjoying the magnificent sunset. It is one of the most beautiful places in San Diego.
Storm moving in
There is a big storm moving into San Diego from Alaska. The winds on the beach were howling and it was just a matter of time before the heavy rains hit and they did. This picture was taken of the lifeguard tower on abandoned Pacific Beach just moments before the big rains hit.
The Duck on Mirror Lake
The elusive duck on mirror lake
One of the most interesting hikes we did at Yosemite was the short hike to Mirror Lake from Yosemite Valley. My friends Aaron, Lorie and I woke up at 4:45 am to make the short trek so that we could be at the lakes at sunrise. We hiked for about a mile and we came to what we thought was a creek that had a sign saying it was mirror lake. Based on some pictures we saw in a Yosemite photo book which depicted a large and wonderful deathly calm lake we were absolutely positive that the sign was a mistake. We kept trekking down the stony path for another 30 minutes until we came to a dead-end. Realizing our mistake we back trekked to the Mirror Lake creek. When we got back we realized that you had to actually follow the creek around and there were parts that the lake formed nicely.
We came to one interesting part of the lake formation where the mountains and sky seemed to have a perfect mirror image in the lake. There was this duck that was there floating when we got there. Aaron and I rushed for our cameras to capture the floating duck on the lake – the duck would appear on the lake where the mirror image of the mountains would be on the surface of the water but it would not be in the sky above. Well the duck got scared and swam off. We were disappointed. Aaron and Lorie left for a little bit and I continued to snap away trying to find the perfect image. It was hard because we were there too early – the sun was not light enough to light up the trees and landscape close to us, but it was too bright and would wash out the sky if we turned the exposure too high. All of sudden the duck swam back towards me, and got into exactly the position that I wanted. I snapped away, trying to capture a nice image. I did finally get an ok image, not tremendous but enough to satisfy what we were looking for.
Photography requires a lot of patience and you never know what you are going to get when you go out taking photos. It’s oftentimes not really up to you, its up to mother nature.