Christmas in LA

So, I guess I'm a little overdue on posting my Yosemite pics. One of the things you don't often hear about digital photography is how much work is involved after you take the picture. Not always, but in many cases. Photoshop is the new darkroom. It's a little disconcerting actually. Photographers used to dodge and burn images to get the right contrast, but now it's blurring the line between color correcting and "digital art."

In a recent edition of Popular Photography Magazine, almost all of the winning images were so photoshopped that I wouldn't have felt comfortable calling them photographs, rather than digital art. The grand prize winner was a beautiful "picture" of a mountain scene. At first I was breathtaken, then a found out that is was a compilation of more than 30 pictures of the same scene taken over the course of two months. It's one thing to take a light picture and a dark picture and blend them, because the camera cannot handle the dynamic range of brightness in a picture, but 30 pictures over two months?

But I digress. I'll post the Yosemite and King's Canyon pics soon, but in the meantime, I figured I'd tell you how Christmas went. We went down to L.A. again for Christmas, and this time went to Disneyland on Christmas Eve. It was fun, but I tire of most amusement parks after a day or so, and Disney especially. It's just a big Disney commercial blared at full volume for the entire day. The rides are more entertaining than exciting, and the lines and crowds are frustrating. I don't know if it's because I'm getting old, or because I'm still young, but I actually didn't care as much for the rides as the shows and parades.

I was blessed with many nice presents this Christmas, including some camping gear, new cookbooks and an engraved pocket watch from Kat.

On the drive home, we decided to try a new route, since I-5 is both nerve-racking and sometimes slow. US 101 is a longer drive, but we enjoyed it more. Some new scenery was nice. In fact, any scenery was an improvement. Going out through LA and Ventura county was actually kind of pretty. There was a light fog nestled in the valleys, a look I like to call "Strip Malls in the Mist." And the coastal mountains are starting to turn green. Actually it's an odd sort of tan-green color as the new grass grows through the old. And we stopped at a winery near Paso Robles, the wine region where Sideways was filmed. Pretty good stuff. There was a huge vineyard we passed through, the largest I've ever seen. It seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in every direction for miles. I really should have taken a picture, but the camera was buried in luggage. Maybe next time.