One of my favorite activities to do while traveling is to take night time landscapes. It gives me a little bit of a rush because you don't quite know how the photo will appear after a 30 second exposure. During this visit to Mammoth, the Milky Way was on full display. Few clouds as well as little light pollution made for great conditions for astro-photography.
It's not often you're able to visit a waterfall of this size. On this visit to the falls, I brought along my new tilt shift lens to look at it in a new way. However, swimming in the cold water on a hot day never gets old. We also ventured another mile down the river to the lower falls and was greeted by a peaceful oasis.
When I last worked a summer at Forest Home in 2012, I was just coming into my own. I had begun shooting weddings in 2011 and had some during the summer while living a camp. My focus and interest was in portraits and pictures of my friends. It was only until after I left that my interest turned to landscapes and skill sets that involved a little more patience, composition and travel.
Coming back and spending some time in the canyon gave me the chance to go back and see the camp and it's surrounding nature with new eyes and a different vantage point than what I left with.
After a couple of years of travel and landscape photography, I walked back into the Forest Home marketing department and asked what type of photos they needed from me. To my pleasure, they showed me an inspiration page of landscapes and astro-photography. The rest is history.
When I started to challenge myself to take photographs that weren't of plants, food, or my dog, I would go to the beach and photograph my friends and the sunset. One morning after an all-nighter, some classmates and I went to watch the sunrise from the top of Signal Hill. It was there that I fell in love with the color and the magic of a new day.
It's been a love and hate relationship since then. As I type this entry, I'm still pretty tired from waking up two mornings in a row to see the dawn in Mill Creek Canyon. This morning different though. As the second morning of the weekend, we planned this one out as we knew the outcome was to be spectacular. As we arrived, we pulled out the Jet Boil to make some coffee and we flew the drone with a newly taped on polarizer filter.
Here are some shots of a new day dawning.
We woke up at 5:30 in the morning and were greeted to overcast clouds that crept their way up the canyon. After flying the drone around the Forest Home sign off California 38, we ventured down around Mountain Home Village to dance in the clouds.
