A Trip to the Beach

Since the weather forecast looked good, we decided to take a drive over to Jalama Beach for a walk along the beach and a Jalama Burger for lunch.  The weather turned out to be fabulous, with clear skies, pleasant temperatures and almost no breeze.  I took along my new Canon 100-400mm zoom lens to start getting some practice shooting with it.

As we were pulling out of our driveway, I spotted this Red-Shouldered Hawk sitting on a sign just down the street.

As we started down towards the beach, I shot some images of birds in Jalama Creek, including these Least Sandpipers.

Along the beach I took these shots of stones in the wet sand.

Digital Manipulation

I recently started playing around again with digital effects to make photographs look like paintings.  I have played with this using Photoshop from time to time.  I happened to see someone mention a free painting effects program called PhotoSketcher, in an online photography discussion forum.  I downloaded and started playing with this program and was quite impressed with the capability of this free program.  Below are a few examples that I worked on.  The first image in each pair is the original photograph.  The second image is the digitally modified image.

Valley of Fire 2010

On our way home from Yellowstone and the Tetons, we stopped at Valley of Fire State Park north-east of Las Vegas.

Looks like a skull to me...

Fall in Jackson Hole 2010

After Yellowstone we went down to Jackson Hole and the Tetons for a couple of days.  The fall color appeared to be at about its peak.

These old barns along Mormon Row have got to be one of the most photographed spots in the world!

Canids in Yellowstone

One of our top hopes while in Yellowstone was to see some wolves in the wild.  On that we had very marginal success.  We did see coyotes frequently and they were much easier to photograph.  We'll just have to go back and try again!

The only wolf we saw was running across a hillside at quite a distance.  These are the only pictures (heavily cropped) we were able to get.

The coyotes we watched seemed to be having a lot of success in their hunting.

Yellowstone's Waterfalls

Yellowstone has many of Barbara's favorite objects, waterfalls!

Upper Yellowstone Falls.

Lower Yellowstone Falls.

Cascades along the Yellowstone River.

Tower Falls.

Firehole Falls.

We saw several trout try to leap up Firehole Falls!