Photos as I Like It

This is a small piece of the City of South Pasadena's self-built float. South Pas has a long tradition of building the cities Rose Parade float by city residents and no large companies. It's always something fun and playful.

On my second day in the Port Townsend (extended) area, we drove a little west and first went to the Dungeness Spit, the world's longest natural sand spit. After lunch and a walk along the beach, we headed into the mountains to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park. From this ridge, only 17 miles, pretty much straight up, we could see a view of the Olympic Mountains on one side and the Juan de Fuca Strait and Canada on the other side. The path downhill to the Spit winds through a small forested area before dropping you out onto a small sliver of land heading straight out into open water (below). After our 17 mile drive into the Olympic National Park, we reached Hurricane Ridge with this incredible view of the Olympic Mountains, where if you look closely in this first photo and the one below you can see the glaciers. A fairly tame black-tailed deer fawn was eating by the side of the road with two other older deer. I used a telephoto lens, but I'm not...

It's been awhile since I've posted anything on the blog, and even longer since I've posted something that wasn't for the colors photo challenge. I'm taking a mini vacation in the Port Townsend, WA area for a couple days before I enjoy the usual visit to Bumbershoot over Labor Day weekend. I found a lot to photograph so far on the first day and had a chance to review them and felt like getting these favorites posted right away. The first photo is of the Point Wilson Lighthouse in Port Townsend right near Fort Worden, which is the second two photos. There are actually two buildings in the lighthouse photo, a small office/museum building in the front and the lighthouse behind it, but I liked the merged version. The Fort is where there filmed An Officer and a Gentleman. The last photo is taken from the beach outside the cottage I'm staying. This is right on Discovery Bay, just a couple miles outside of Port Townsend. The sky was beautiful and the bay so calm. ...

Midnight blue and Navy blue are so close in color, it's a very subtle difference. So, I've decided to go with this photo as a combo for the two colors. Navy blue is the slightly brighter blue of the darker colors in this piece. Midnight blue is the darkest color. The photo is of one of the many pieces in the Art in the Street exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary in downtown LA.

I love the mix of detail and softness in this photo and it overall just has a sense of the color "melon".

A little something different for mahogany. I took this photo of a wall mural at Fairyland , a children's playground in Oakland. Mahogany is the color of the middle fairies pants, and I felt the soft border was appropriate for this threesome of fairies.

I love this shot of a butterfly I took at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens butterfly pavilion. It really shows what my macro lens can do. The detail is just incredible. And, I was inspired by my friend Slade to enter some photos into a contest for the first time, and as soon as I saw this image I knew I had something I wanted to share. If you like it as much as I do, please vote for me in the National Wildlife Federation photo contest .

I really like the reflection of the neon lights on the sign in this one.

I struggled with lavender for awhile, as like Molly I was surprised how pink the lavender crayon is and not what I expected. I tried several different shots and finally decided on this one of my pillow case.

I stumbled across the annual Concorso Ferrari show on Colorado Boulevard last weekend, and took many photos of this car trying to see if it would work for one of my green colors, but then found the gold exhaust pipes.

I moved recently, and in the process of packing and unpacking all my stuff, I've definitely been rediscovering the things I own, giving me an opportunity to find many new items to photograph for the Crayola challenge. This is a soy sauce dish for use when eating sushi.

I found this candle stand in a jumble of sale items at the local nursery. It all seemed so unexpected and out of context, but I loved the setting and pile of stuff that had nothing to do with a nursery.

I went to the Huntington Gardens this past weekend to test out this amazing new macro lens I was recently given, and these are a few of my favorites. I really enjoy taking macro photos and looking at ordinary objects in a new way.

Taken in the Chinese Gardens at the Huntington Gardens.

I took this picture of stacked crates a couple of weeks ago thinking it might be bittersweet, but I quickly learned bittersweet was really part of the orange family. I like the little bit of yellow peeking through the stack, so was happy to realize this would work for brown. Please welcome a new player to the photo challenge and check out Lindsay's blog .

This is a small section of one of my favorite teacups given to me after my Grandma died. I always loved the teacup set she had and it reminds me of her having it hanging in my house. I was very excited when I realized this would work for one of my photo picks in this challenge.

This was one of the 600-700 "Common Dolphins" I saw out on a boat last week. It was really amazing to see so many of them, and how they liked to swim along with the boat. As a bonus to my color entry, here is a video I took of them swimming along. P.S. If you're following closely the original list of colors, you may notice I skipped blue gray. We've discovered it's very difficult to find the right photo without being able to actually draw something with the crayon, and blue gray is one of the colors that Crayola retired awhile back. We will be updating the list with the replacement colors, final selections TBD. P.P.S. Molly has joined in the fun of the photo challenge, check out her blog postings here .

This is an old favorite of Johnny, but the photo I've wanted to use for black since I knew I would be doing this photo challenge. It's actually one of the first digital photos I took when I received my first DSLR.

I've started a new photo challenge for 2011, Crayola Colors. Having completed the alphabet challenge last year, Sarah and I decided to do a color challenge, but not just any colors, the original box of 64 Crayola Crayon colors. We've removed 12 colors so that we have 52, 1 per week. We're a bit behind, but we'll catch up somewhere along the way. Come back regularly for updates to see the rest of the list: Aquamarine Bittersweet Black Blue Blue Gray Blue Green Brick Red Brown Cadet Blue Carnation Pink Chestnut Copper Cornflower Forest Green Gold Gray Green Green Blue Lavender Lemon Yellow Magenta Mahogany Maize Maroon Melon Midnight Blue Mulberry Navy blue Olive Green Orange Orange Red Orchid Periwinkle Pine Green Plum Raw Umber Red Red Orange Red Violet Salmon Sea Green Sepia Silver Sky Blue Spring Green Turquoise Blue Violet (Purple) Violet Blue Violet Red White Yellow Yellow Green