After Southern Oregon we took a drive down the north coast of California to visit my parents in Mendocino and see my mother give a reading from her newly published poetry book (from March Street Press). Before Diana and I left the kids and took off for the Canadian Rockies, we had some time for a family hike, and I pushed for Russian Gulch State Park, in part so that I could take a photo of the bridge that now adorns the Wikipedia article on the park. But it was a very pretty hike, with a waterfall at the end, and I took some other photos as well, and even kept a few of them. Gallery here.

Or, why I couldn't attend the FOCS program committee meeting last weekend.

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...And it's taken until now to sort through all the photos. In the interest of completeness, I haven't been as ruthless as usual about deleting the questionable or redundant shots, but that led to a lot more time in Photoshop processing them all. The galleries are as linked above, or if you want a single link that leads to all of them, here it is.

As usual for the holidays, I visited my parents in Mendocino and my in-laws in Palo Alto. It's odd how sometimes the things I think about are caught up in location: I was working on one problem in Palo Alto, completely forgot about it while I was in Mendocino, and returned to it anew once I returned to Palo Alto.

Photos now online from my wife's cousin's son's birthday (colors a little wonky, probably only of interest to relatives, but they came out better than I thought they had) and New Years Eve at MacKerricher State Park. It was cold and windy; we didn't stay long, and later caught the very pretty tail end of the sunset (and some very good seafood pasta) at Sharon's in Noyo Harbor. I tried cropping some of these 2:1, even wider than the 16:9 aspect ratio that I usually crop panoramic shots; I think it works well for this subject.

Some photos from our recent Christmas visit to Mendocino. There are a couple of family snapshots at the start, but most of them are scenery at Pudding Creek Beach and Big River.

I've finally found time to finish processing the photos from my recent visit to Mendocino. I've sorted them into five subdirectories, three of which are mostly family snapshots. The two that aren't are my photos from the July 4th parade and half a dozen views of the Pt. Cabrillo lighthouse.

Also, with the parade photos, I experimented in the raw conversions with setting the contrast significantly lower than I normally would, and boosting the saturation to match, so that more dynamic range is visible than normally would be with that kind of lighting. Seems to have worked pretty well to my eye...

Still to come as I continue working through the backlog: blackberry picking and some shots of the Bren Hall construction.

I took some 300 photos at the July Fourth parade today, so even if I end up keeping only 20% of them it will be a while until they're all processed. In the meantime here's a retrospective of past parades: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. Enough to make me start to feel like a regular. I also have some photos from 1989 when we came to Mendocino for our honeymoon but I haven't gotten around to scanning any of my old film...

Three galleries of photos now up from my recent travels in Mendocino. Two from short walks with the kids into Jack Peters Canyon and up the Big River (the second hike started dry and with even a little sunshine, but a brief downpour caught us on the way back so we came home quite wet), and one of some architectural details from the construction on my parents' next-door neighbor's perennially unfinished house. I mixed in a few landscapes and abstracts of flowing water with the hike shots.

I missed seeing my cousin and her parents (they had Christmas with my parents in Petaluma while I was in Palo Alto) but it was good to see my brother's family again for the several days we were there. Along with the two hikes, we took a few shopping trips into the Mendocino village, but the rain kept us in the house more than usual. At one point on New Year's eve, all five good roads out of town were closed (20, 128, both directions on 1, and the Philo-Greenwood road), we didn't get a newspaper, and even the internet connection went down. We all tried to stay up until midnight for the new year, the kids watching movies while the adults sat around reading (Beowulf for me); Timothy gave up around 10:00 but I think the rest were successful. The storms finally let up the day we left, though continued flooding on the Navarro forced us to take Philo-Greenwood, and we had a beautiful sunset over Marin for our return drive.

Photos from a family walk on the Mendocino Headlands, the evening of July 4th. Almost caught up on my backlog of unprocessed pictures...



The gallery has larger versions of these, and some family snapshots.

Photos of the Fuente art car, parked on Ukiah St. near the Mendocino Post Office following the July 4th parade. A small teaser:



See the gallery for more and larger.