This blog has been quiet for the past couple weeks- we were on vacation! We drove up the coast where our final destination was San Francisco for a week, then a day in Gilroy for the Garlic Festival. All in all, I drove 1200 miles and took over 1400 photos. I'll be posting the highlights over the next week or two.

You can see the full set by clicking on a photo, or by going to my Flickr page and clicking on the Travel collection.

We got up really early on this Saturday morning to get through L.A. before people were on the roads, stopping in Santa Barbara for breakfast.



Little did I know that fog was going to be the theme for the whole week.



I bought an Ultra-Wide lens just before we left so that I could take in some of the sweeping vistas of the coast. It's great for getting it all in the shot. I've also adjusted my watermark a bit- making the lens and eyebrow slightly smaller while leaving the website tag basically the same size. I want people to be able to find me without having too big a watermark. Hopefully it's just annoying enough that bands will still want to buy the clean versions, but it won't distract too much from the image for the fans.



I did a lot of long exposure shooting on this trip, but I wasn't really happy with the colors, so I converted them to black and white. This will make it easy to see which ones are 30 second or longer exposures in the full galleries. Morro Bay was very pretty, and has a huge boulder sitting right on the water.



We went to Hearst Castle too and those photos will be in their own post, but Hearst Beach had a really long pier. This wasn't built by the city of San Simeon, Hearst had it built for his family and anyone who happened to be driving by.



Once past San Simeon, the views get really interesting.



















Next up, photos from Hearst Castle.