San Bernardino

getting a little close there! we had some pretty bad fires this last year near our house, as you can tell! they were actually a lot worse up on the mountains behind our house on the other side. this is just a little hill that caught on fire but they had to evacuate a ton of people in our neighborhood. most of the cars flying by the house in the picture are fire trucks and rescue workers. i've really been getting into doing night photos lately so this will be the first of many that i take/post on here.

cows in the field

these are some random cows i photographed out in a field up near the city of taft near the central valley in california. i was up there for a meeting one day and took the camera with me in hopes of finding something up there photo worthy. there wasn't much as you can see, but the beautiful black cows grazing in the lush green grass. i'd never seen so many black cows in such a beautiful setting before. the funny thing about the photo is the one white cow in the photo looks like it was p-shopped, but it was just sitting there looking at me while the rest of the cows looked on. sometimes i feel a little awkward taking photos like this. the local people were probably passing me on the highway in their pickups wondering what in the world i was doing. city folk don't see cows very often. if sophie or ava would've been with me i probably would've treated the experience like a trip to the zoo, seeing that this is about the extent of animal exposure my little ones get besides the occasional lizard on our historical 1930's wrap-around swing-laden porch (i mean, 7'x7' porch that i can't do jump rope on). :)

windmill farm

ever since i can remember i have been enamored with these windmills that are found about 30 minutes from our house and about 30 minutes from palm springs. they're out in the middle of nowhere between two small mountain ranges, divided only by the 10 freeway and a few rural highways. there is a kind of beautiful mystique about them as they move at varied speeds from each other, weathering the harsh climate of the desert, while representing another technological attempt of man to artificially generate our most critical resource- electricity. there is an architectural and technological beauty to such an advanced device that seamlessly meets with nature in the desert landscape. occasionally i venture out to the palm springs area for meetings and this time i took the camera in hopes of having a blue non-hazy sky and a few minutes to get the windmills on film. next time i plan on hiking around the area at night with a full moon so i can take some unique night shots.