A man holds a "Jobs not cuts" sign and flashes the peace sign behind the "Occupy Orange County in Unity with Occupy Wall St." sign at the Occupy Orange County encampment at Irvine, CA.
The Occupy Wall Street movement began about a month and a half ago, and since then has spread a cities worldwide, including Irvine and Santa Ana right here in Orange County. Regular readers of this blog will know that my photographic genre can best be described as cat pictures biological macro photography: I take pictures of spiders, mice, plants, and other such things.
Tom walks in front of the bright orange "Occupy Orange County - in unity with Occupy Wall Street" banner while holding a sign with a newspaper boy holding a paper with a graphical "No greed" written on it.
Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at some documentary street photography, and headed down to the Occupy Orange County – Irvine camp to see what was going on.
On Sunday evening at Occupy Orange County there weren't many folks holding signs; the tents were taking care of the task for them.
The camp was fairly quiet on Sunday around sunset, so I focused on documenting the environment, including the sea of tents that has popped up.
It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time for some dark, moody pictures. I’ll start with one of my favorite sinister shots of Little Corona Beach in Corona Del Mar:
Who just came ashore in that lone boat? Why do so many of the houses have no lights on? And is that a thin layer of mist creeping in over the oddly-still water?
And, of course, what would Halloween be without spiderwebs?
This spider web was covered in dew on a foggy morning at Crystal Cove State Park. It looks creepy to me, especially since the droplets look like they have little eyes in them.
Or a misty trail, heading off into the unknown?
A trail winds off in the distance behind scraggly foliage into a fog shrouded unknown up a hill. Taken in Crystal Cove State Park on a foggy afternoon, just before sunset. I love the creepy feel of this.
Or a giant spider?
A large orb weaver spider sits in the center of her web, just waiting for some prey (you, perhaps?) to come along and get stuck in her web. And if you say "Squee!" to this instead of "Eeek!", you're my kind of person 🙂
And, as a special Halloween addition, I saw a ghost while photographing the Occupy Orange County camp last night (gallery here). He was just a wisp of a man in a hat, holding a sign:
A long exposure shot taken at dusk shows just the outline of a man in a hat holding a sign next to an empty lawn chair at Occupy Orange County - Irvine. Is this a ghost of protesters past?
Do you have any scary, creepy, or sinister pictures to share?
Have a spooky day!
[Updated to add the ghost picture on Oct. 31, 2011, with thanks to Alpenglow Images for the inspiration.]
It’s fall here in coastal Orange County, CA1, but determining that it’s fall can be difficult since we don’t have trees filled with yellow and red leaves. Around here I find that there’s no better indicator of fall than seeing one of these hanging around outside2:
A large orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) sits in the center of her web, just waiting for some prey (you, perhaps?) to come along and get stuck in her web.
These orb weaver spiders come out every year in late summer and early fall, building webs at dusk that are frequently more than a foot across and can have individual lines of silk running more than 10 feet from attachment point to attachment point. They’re amazing animals, and I love to see them every year3.
This year a few took up residence close enough for me to try out my new macro lens. And, since it’s almost Halloween, it’s a perfect time to post up some spider pictures. Here’s one of the spiders just hangin’ out:
An orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) hangs upside down from a portion of its web.
In this profile shot you can see how the spider has a small strand of silk attaching herself to the web as a safety-strap:
A large tan orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) hangs down from her web in this side-view (profile) of her. She's hanging from intact strands of her web, but the strands above those (that are all coiled up) are from a portion of the web that was damaged.
The attachment points of all eight legs onto the bottom of the cephalothorax is a fun feature to focus on (and probably the last view of many a doomed insect):
A gray male pet mouse stands on all four paws and looks just past the camera, seemingly ready for anything.
Recently I got the opportunity to photograph a few fancy mice, and I just have to share the cuteness here on the blog. I had rats or mice as pets for more than a decade before getting my current cats, and I dearly loved them; in fact, I’d still have rodent pets if it weren’t for their horribly short lifespans 1.
Editor’s note: I’ll try to add commentary throughout these pictures, but I should probably just say “SQUEEE!” after each picture, because that’s what I’m really doing inside when I see these.
A gray male mouse with black eyes peers over the top of a clear plastic cage. He's just poking his nose over, and looks like he's hesitantly wondering what, or who, is out there.
Mice are incredibly fun to watch, especially in large groups. They’re always exploring the boundaries of their cages:
A gray male pet mouse jumps up on the side of a clear plastic cage and holds himself up by his front paws, peering over the edge into the vast unknown beyond the cage. I like how the whiskers are fully three-dimensional: you can see how they extend around the face in all directions - front, back, top, bottom, and sides.
or poking their noses out of tubes:
A white and black patchy male mouse sniffs at what's outside his green tube. The focus is right on his adorable pink nose!
One of the things I love about photography is how seemingly small technical details can dramatically change the feel of an image. A few months ago, as I was taking sunset pictures at Newport Back Bay, I stayed until nearly the end of dusk, trying to capture the feel of the warmly-lit houses surrounding the cool bay. I ended up having to use exposures of more than a minute, eventually capturing the feel of the evening in this image:
Taken well after sunset, this 70 second exposure of the western bluffs as clouds roll in at Newport Back Bay (in Newport Beach, CA) has an ethereal glow to it.
While I’d always known that long shutter speeds allow you to blur motion, in that evening I discovered just how much they change the look of large bodies of water: the water changed from a choppy, dynamic fluid into a silky smooth, calm body 1.
I was hooked. I quickly added a 3-stop (8x) neutral density filter to my wishlist, and was lucky enough to get one as a present recently (thanks mom!). To experiment with using long shutter speeds and bodies of water, I headed to Little Corona Beach (Robert E Badham Marine Life Refuge) in Corona Del Mar three times over the last month.
With the sun still out, the neutral density filter stacked with my polarizer let me extend exposures to a few seconds, allowing me to capture the feel of the water crashing over the rocks, with waves diluted to mist in the air:
A long-exposure shot taken just before sunset at Little Corona beach in Corona Del Mar (Newport Beach), CA. The water almost looks like fog, and I like how you can see the water cascading over the middle rock.
And water in the somewhat protected rocky areas smoothed out to be a shimmering, reflective surface:
Water turns into a silky smooth sheen in a long-exposure shot of the rocky intertidal at Little Corona Beach in Corona Del Mar.
But the real fun came after the sun went down, and I could use exposure times of a minute or longer while capturing the ethereal, post-sunset glow:
On the recommendation of a good programmer friend I’m using WordPress to host this blog, and I’m extremely happy with it so far. I ended up using the default theme (WordPress Twenty Ten 1.2) with fairly little customization. To post pictures I upload them to my Photoshelter account, and then use the awesomely-easy Photoshelter WordPress plugin to put them in the posts.
But one minor annoyance I’ve had is that the maximum image I could post was around 600 pixels wide, which is a bit smaller than I’d like. So, I talked to my programmer friend, and she told me how to make the theme wider. I thought I’d share the changes here, in case anyone else wants to do it:
But, in looking at the traffic coming to my blog, a lot of folks are searching for information on camping at Crystal Cove State Park. So, as a final Crystal Cove wrap-up post I’ll share some pictures of the trail and our campsite.
My REI Quarterdome T2 tent set up with rainfly at Crystal Cove State Park's Lower Moro campground.
While I loved my short trip to Crystal Cove’s inland campground, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind:
There is no water available in the park except at the parking lot. So, you’ll need to carry in enough water to last for your entire trip.
The campgrounds are a couple of miles away from the parking lot, and there’s a few hundred feet elevation gain, so you’ll need to be backpacking and give yourself enough time to get there before sunset.
The park is centrally located in Orange County, and may get crowded during peak periods. While we were the only people at the entire campground when we went, friends have reported finding the Lower Moro campground entirely full, and having to hike on to the campgrounds further inland. You’ll also be sharing the trail with day hikers and mountain bikers, so don’t expect a lonely wilderness hike.
You’ll start out your trip at the new Crystal Cove State Park day use area, which comes complete with lots of parking, bathrooms, water fountains, a path to the ocean, and numerous picnic tables.
The new day use area at Crystal Cove State Park.
The trail leaves from the end of the parking lot, and after climbing all the way to the top of the coastal hills, you can look back on Crystal Cove State Park:
I fell asleep and awoke to fog while camping in Crystal Cove State Park a few weeks ago. The flowers became beautifully covered in dew, so I spent most of my free time photographing them.
But what struck me as I was doing my closeup work was how much the fog changed the feel of the park. When the fog rolled in a few hours before sunset, the landscape changed from a dusty, hot California hillside covered in dry grass to something moodier, almost creepy.
A trail winds off in the distance behind scraggly foliage into a fog shrouded unknown at Crystal Cove State Park.
As the wisps of fog blew by, trails that used to be perfectly visible became shrouded in mist. The plants transformed from water-starved sticks to haunting menaces, stalking trails that led into nothing by grayness.
Mist on a foggy morning shrouds the trail as it passes through bushes in Crystal Cove State Park.
And the spiderwebs seemed perfect for Halloween, the little droplets of water sometimes looking like a thousand little eyes peering out at you.
The droplets of water on this spiderweb are especially creepy to me, as they almost look like they have eyes in them.A spider web covered in varying sizes of dew droplets.A spider web covered in dew on a foggy morning at Crystal Cove.
Photographers: How do you work in fog to capture the feel of it, without just ending up with pictures that look under-contrasty and bland?
Hopefully these images will please Greg, as he’s ribbed me about my lack of grayscale work.
Crystal Cove State Park: Located along Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) between Corona Del Mar and Laguna Beach in Orange County, California. I camped at the Lower Moro Campsite, which is about a 2 mile hike in from the parking lot. Parking is plentiful at a new parking lot and picnic area past the Moro Campground (for RV’s), but you must pay either a day use fee for the state park or an overnight fee. The park is currently open from 6am – sunset; their website has lots of good information on it.
I’ve already posted a few pictures from my recent backpacking trip to Crystal Cove State Park (flowers, self-portrait, rattlesnake mating). But as I was photographing dew-covered flowers on the foggy morning, I couldn’t help but notice the spiders in their spiderwebs.
An orb weaving spider in a dew covered web standing so that it appears to have only four legs. My best guess is that this is in genus _Argiope_.
I had to get up closer, of course:
Up close and personal, this spider (probably in _Argiope_) is just gorgeous on a foggy morning.
And, you know me, I’m not satisfied unless the subject is spilling out of the frame, but I’ll spare you from a third picture of the same spider in the same post.
Since I know spiders are everyone’s favorite critter, here’s another one I saw that morning:
A brown and tan orb weaver spider stands on its dew covered web in front of an orange background.
But I saw more than just spiders that morning. After the fog burned off, the day warmed up and a ton of insects came out to go about their business. Chief among them were dozens of bees buzzing around this plant:
A honeybee (_Apis mellifera_) forager samples the wares at an all-you-can-eat buffet of white and purple/yellow spike-inflorescence flowers in Crystal Cove State Park.
While most of the spider and flower shots I’ve already posted used my new macro lens on a tripod, the rest of theses shots tested out how the lens performed hand-held with fast-moving subjects. It worked very well, auto-focusing quickly and allowing me to get decent depth of field with shutter speeds fast enough to freeze motion:
A honeybee (_Apis mellifera_) forager sticks her antennae and forelegs into a small purple and white flower at Crystal Cove State Park. The bee's pollen basket (corbicula) on her hind legs is stuffed full with tan pollen.
Of course there were more than just bees and spiders out. My hiking partners spotted this cabbage butterfly flitting around on the trail, and the macro exceeded my expectations by allowing me to capture this image in the few seconds I had before the butterfly flitted away 1:
This past Monday I found myself in possession of a rare bit of spare time around sunset, so I zipped down to Little Corona Beach, which is just off Pacific Coast Highway in Corona Del Mar. My primary purpose for the trip was to try out my new three-stop neutral density filter, but I found a nice surprise at the entrance to the beach:
Two flowering agaves on the bluffs at Little Corona Beach, seen just before sunset. I love the combination of classic California coastal bluffs in the background and the inflorescences in the foreground.
The agaves were absolutely gorgeous, especially since their quickly-growing inflorescences could be composed with classic California ocean scenes in the background.
Two flowering agaves on the bluffs at Little Corona Beach, seen just before sunset.
These inflorescences won’t be around forever. Just like the Agave I photographed earlier this year (gallery 1, gallery 2), the inflorescence will grow to a certain height, burst into flower, and then die (and then likely get ripped out by the landscapers, which is what happened to the one at OCC). Also, agaves typically flower only once during their entire lives.
So, local photographers, this is your only chance to capture these agaves at their peak. I’m no botanist, but my guess is that they’ll quickly grow too tall for their tips to be included in a sea-scape composition without a ladder. I don’t know how long it will be until they flower, either, but my guess is we’ve got a few weeks (as I didn’t see any flower buds present yet).
If you do go and photograph them, I’ve got only two requests:
Respect the fence that protects the agaves and their surrounding vegetation. The bluffs are very delicate, and local groups have been working very hard to re-vegetate the area.
If you do get some good shots, I’d love it if you could share them with everyone by posting a comment here linking to them.
