Seaside walk

Yesterday morning, I asked Tony to show me how to use his camera. It's not just the little cutesy metallic green point-and-shoot cameras that most of us mamas have. Oh no. It's one of those big black ones with all the buttons and knobs and it has all kinds of attachments like lenses and lights and things. And a big black bag that he carries it all around in and God help him if it ever got stolen or damaged. I have never seen my Zen Master of a husband angry, but I'm definitely sure that steam would pour out of his ears and quite possibly lightening would stream down from the sky and zap an innocent grandma in the wazoo.

In my quest for learning how to do new things, I asked him a whole bunch of questions about what makes a good photographer. I mean, two people could take a picture of the same thing and the image by the everyday tourist would look just OK and the other by the trained photographer would capture the pure essence of what that object is inside and out. What makes the difference? We spoke about angles and lighting and lens types and composition and editing. I get the lingo because I have taken many a college art course and studied Art History more than most people would care to admit. I've dabbled a bit in photography, but that was many many years ago. I never really took to it because I didn't like turning into a bat and bumping about blindly in the darkroom. No thank you. Since then the whole digital revolution has come about and that is something entirely foreign to me. USB cables and Photoshop and who knows what else.

So we hoofed it down to the Oceanside Pier and Harbor. The pelican is Tony's shot, but the other three are mine. He tinkered with Picassa and here are the results. Hooray me.

This pelican was showing off for a little crowd of squealing children. He had it pretty good, seeing as it was the end of the day and there was little to no luck in the fish-catching department. He got the spoils of the left-over bait. Lucky duck... I mean lucky pelican.

This is a shot from under the Oceanside Pier. The waves were still rather large from the remnants of the Samoan earthquake. It was really something to see them crashing through the posts. Tony added a sepia tone and adjusted the sharpness and contrast. There was a small tweak on the angle as well.

There was a bike rental shop just below the pier. This image was cropped just a bit to focus on just the lines of the bike frames.

This shot was taken over by the Oceanside Harbor. I like the two blues with the sharp white trim. Just a small crop on this one.