La Mesa’s Resident Hawk

        I am writing this at 5pm on July 4th, 2010, so I have less than two hours to get downtown to watch the fireworks display in San Diego Bay. I plan on capturing some amazing images. The OTHER thing that happened today was me snapping a couple pics of the very outspoken hawk that has been in my neighborhood for a month or so.

        I readily admit that the pics for this post are weird, but I am in a hurry because I am going down to San Diego Bay to see The Big Boom fireworks show. I am going to attempt a complete guerrilla photo shoot for this. It will all be on public transportation so wish me luck.

Yellowjacket Wasp

        This yellowjacket wasp was grooming herself when I ran into her. I was taking pictures of some construction in the road when she landed, had a quick bath and left.

Lake Murray – Mission Trails Regional Park

        Now that I have been rediscovering my inline skating roots, I am also discovering great places to skate around San Diego. Mission Trails Regional Park – Lake Murray is in La Mesa, CA and is very close to my house. There is an asphalt trail that winds its way around Lake Murray and it is for bikers, skaters and pedestrians only. Awesome! The Alvarado Water Treatment Plant sits along one edge of Lake Murray, and is a restricted area, so the trail is not a loop. That means that it is a 6 mile round trip, and it is worth every bit of it.

Alvarado Water Treatment Plant

        As you approach the entrance to the Lake Murray section of the park, you will pass by the Alvarado Water Treatment Plant, which bristles with fences and warning signs. This is one side of the plant, and the other side is actually a dam that is also off limits to park-goers.

Lake Murray – Mission Trails Regional Park

Ducks In Lake Murray

        I had never skated this trail before, so my concentration on the terrain and skating technique, not my photography. This path is asphalt, so it will wear down your wheels, especially the front two over the course of the 6 mile skate. There are a few dips and sharp turns, but they are fun, not scary and even a beginner skater will enjoy them. There are only a few sections of the path that are lumpy, but they are short sections and don’t ruin the skate at all.

Weekend Visitors Enjoy Lake Murray

        Most of the photos for this post were taken at the far end of the trail that circles most of the way around Lake Murray. The shot above was taken from the very end of the trail, with the camera pointed back across the Lake.

Alvarado Water Treatment Plant And Dam On Lake Murray

        This is the view from the OTHER side of Alvarado water treatment plant and the reason for a giant NO TRESPASSING sign at the end of the trail.

Fishing In Lake Murray Mission Trails Regional Park

        Mission Trails Regional Park is a great place to skate, and entry to the park is free, so if you haven’t skated the trail around Lake Murray, you really should give it a try. If you go on a weekday, you will have the park to yourself, but on the weekends, the beach areas draw crowds, and the path may have enough (walking) people on it to cause you to have to maneuver, but it’s only the skaters and cyclists that go all the way to the end, so the farther from the entrance you skate, the less people there are.

The End Of Lake Murray’s Skate Path

        When you see the sign above, you have reached the end of the path. This is where you can hang out, look at the people across the lake, catch your breath and think about where in San Diego you will skate next.

Calliope Hummingbird (Immature Male)

        The two hummingbirds in this post were captured two very different ways, or in particular, with two very different shutter speeds. The one above, made possible by the VR (Vibration Reduction) on my lens was snapped at 1/20th of a second. When I too took this shot, I was sitting on a flight of stairs, with my elbows resting on top of my knees, in a sort of human tripod stance. I held my breath (as I do before I take EVERY shot) and pressed the shutter release button.

Hummingbird Drinks In Balboa Park

        For the shot above, the technique was a little different. This hummingbird, which I first showed in this post here, just came swooping in towards a fountain and and grabbed droplets of water out of the air. Action would have to be frozen, so the shutter speed was dialed up to 1/1250th and over the following 23 seconds, I snapped 22 photos. The one above is my favorite.

A Cactus In Balboa Park

        Just a quick post featuring a cactus in the Old World Garden of Balboa Park, in San Diego. It was broad daylight when I took this pic, but my camera settings seemed to give it a long exposure, nighttime look to it that I thought looked cool. I have a couple other post with photos from Balboa Park, so you should check them out. One post has a great pic of a bee on a flower, and can be seen here.

A Roadrunner Actually Running Down The Road

        At high noon yesterday, I went hunting my neighborhood roadrunner again. I lucked out because I found a two roadrunners in the area, and they seemed to be friends because they were singing like canaries. I will admit that the above photo is not as colorful or tack-sharp as I usually require to make it into my blog, but come on… This is a photo of a roadrunner, roadrunning! How often do you get to see that?

American Roadrunner Stay Away From Me

        Depending on the angle of the sun, the roadrunner’s head and the price of tea in China, roadrunners have a cool, patriotic eyeshadow color scheme. While I was hunting the roadrunner, I was reminded of days past when I would watch Roadrunner cartoons on Saturday mornings, and in particular, the theme song.

        If you’re on a highway and roadrunner goes beep beep,
Just step aside or you might end up in a heap.
Roadrunner roadrunner runs on the road all day.
Even the coyote can’t make him change his ways.
Roadrunner, the coyote’s after you.
Roadrunner, if he catches you your through.
That coyote is really a crazy clown.
When can he learn that he’s never gonna mow him down?
Poor little roadrunner never bothers anyone.
Just running down the road is his idea of having fun.

        The funny thing is that even after listening to that theme song, and even humming along for all those years, I found out today that I didn’t know most of the words. So, I found the song on the web and took a journey back to a Saturday morning in 1982. That’s right, I like to break a mental sweat as well.

Over The Fence And Out Of Sight

        Even though I was physically at least 30 or 40 feet away from the roadrunner at any given time, I think they ultimately just got tired of me following them around. I can’t say I blame them because it was probably their lunch hour too. In the photo above, this roadrunner jumped/flew to the top of a fence, posed for one last photo, then jumped down on the other side and ran away.

Roadrunner

        I’ve seen roadrunners run around the road in Otay Mesa for two years, but never got a photo of one until today. There are at least three that look like this one, and another one that is bigger and is mostly blue. I haven’t seen the blue roadrunner for quite awhile.

A Roadrunner Stares Back

        Birds can really look weird when you happen to see them facing dead at you. Without their beaks to give a sense of depth, they almost have a dog snout. Well, this roadrunner snapshot made me laugh, so into the blog it goes.

Zebra Longwing (Heliconius charitonia)

        The Wild Animal Park, in Encondito, CA just wrapped up a special “Butterfly Jungle” exhibit this past weekend. The entire park, including the butterfly jungle was a great experience and took up an entire Saturday, as well as over 5GB of space on my Nikon D5000′s memory card. After spending a few days sorting and selecting my favorite pics of that day, I found that I had too many keepers for one blog post. I’m going to split that exhausting day into three posts: Butterflies, birds and mammals, in that order.
        This post will feature butterflies. These pics were snapped at 1/500th or faster, and most were at full 450mm zoom. That means the ISO was pretty high (1600-3200 ISO) so there is a bit of noise. Since I know next to nothing about what makes a butterfly tick, I won’t sully their wonderful colors or elegant, nectar slurping lives with any more of my words except to say, “Enjoy.”

Orange-Barred Tiger (Dryadula phaetusa)

Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes)

Malachite (Siproeta stelenes)

Paper Kite Butterfly (Idea leuconoe)”

Malachite (Siproeta stelenes) & Blue Morpho (Morpho peleides)

Postman (Heliconius melpomene)

Oak Canyon Trail

        As a Denver transplant, nature is something that I hold very near and dear. The wildflowers of Colorado are (in my opinion) the show to see at this time of year because you have over a mile of elevation between Denver’s foothills and the Rocky Mountain’s treeline to see flowers you won’t find anywhere else. The alpine flowers are small, robust and barely hint at what color they are, while the city-level flowers are huge, fragrant and colorful.

Hunting Wildflowers

        Yesterday I tried, in vain to find some wildflowers in East County San Diego, along the Oak Canyon Trail. Apparently, I’m just about a week late, because there were hardly any flowers at all. It was still a fun trip and I think my photographic companion and I would still call it a success.

The Biggest Moon Of The Year Just Didn’t Cooperate

        This post will be a little bit different because it will offer a view of the man behind the curtain. October 4th was the actual harvest moon for 2009, but nothing was falling into place, photographically. I had no tripod and the moon was already well above the horizon by the time I set out, so I felt like I had failed. The once a year harvest moon was not properly photographed by me because I was late out of the blocks. What can I say? It wasn’t until I was entering my pad that I saw the spider above, huge and fluttering on it’s web in a very stiff evening breeze. I tried to capture, in camera, the spider, against the moon, but the wind was so strong and my hand so unsteady that I could not quite get the metering I hoped for.

My Mad Photoshop CS4 Skills Had Failed Me

        I attempted to use my digital darkroom to recreate what my eyes had seen, but it was to no avail. The image size had to be reduced so that I would not look like an imbecile, posting photos that were nothing more than hacks or garbage. Hopefully, you can still get an idea of what I was trying to do, even though I failed to do it.

It’s Important Not To Hide When You Fail

        Yet fail is what I did, yet again with this web. The spider, on his web was moving aroung in the breeze so much that use=ing my on camera flash was the only way I could could any detail. The problem was that using the flash blew out the spider, so it was a pure white mess. My solution was to crop as much of the web as I could and that mirror image it so it would look like I had done a grander job than I actually had. Don’t tell!

What Would My Role For This Moon Have Been 1000 Years Ago?

        I actually like this shot, even though it is just a glorified snapshot, and won’t make me any money. The moon has a sense of scale with the trees and the clouds. It lights up the sky and clouds but not the trees. It is huge and it was captured by me. Yes!