Pacifica

Continuing our California adventure, we met up with my son and daughter-in-law in Pacifica. We enjoyed some coastal views as well as a lovely hike in Pacifica's San Pedro Valley Park.

Ravens and crows are hard to tell apart; I'm going to guess this is a Raven. Raven's usually travel in pairs, and this one had a pal on another branch. Crows travel in crowds. Their tail feathers differ, but I missed seeing the tail feathers' shape when this one flew away.

Coastal Raven

Coastline Looking North

Near the end of our hike at San Pedro Valley Park we came across a deer family grazing off our path in the late afternoon sun. They were strongly backlit, so it made for a slight but overall rewarding photographic challenge to capture some shots at 300mm (600mm equivalent). These are all handheld 1/1000 second exposures at ISO 1600, except for "Looking My Way", which was at ISO 1000.

Young Deer

Deer in Sunlight

Questioning Deer

Looking My Way

Older and Wiser Version

All photos © 2018, all rights reserved.  Contact philslens@gmail.com for licensing or to order prints.

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Zion Day Two and Bryce

Welcome to day two of our Utah adventure.

This day's goal was to visit Bryce. To get from Zion National Park (Springdale, UT) to Bryce one goes through the eastern part of Zion through an area with beautiful, but very different terrain from Zion canyon, with surface texture known as slickrock.

This first photo shows this "layered" rock look clearly.

Slickrock Everywhere

Cloudburst

From there we proceeded to Bryce.

Near Sunrise and Sunset Points

Near Sunset and Sunrise Points

Ballerina

Spectrum

Hues

We're Not in Massachusetts

It snowed the day before, so we were treated to some dramatic scenery mid-summer visitors don't normally see:

Snow Touches

At one point the raven cometh.

Raven Staredown

Nevermore

Natural Bridge Point

Inspiration Point

Inspiration Point was our last stop on the Bryce Canyon rim.

We returned to Zion and took the Canyon Overlook trail during, or more accurately, *after*, sunset. The Canyon Overlook view was spectacular, but for us it was getting quite dark. This is an ISO 3200 shot taken around 8:30 in the evening. We descended back down the trail mostly in just moonlight. We could have used our cell phones as flashlights but didn't even think of it.

Canyon Overlook

Moonlit Zion

All photos © 2016, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

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