Leon Turnbull Photography

I have been a bit absent recently. We surprised our kids last weekend by taking them to Legoland in southern California. We figured it would be the one and only chance we’d have to take them there before our oldest grew out of his interest in legos. Jadon has been begging us to go there for the past year. Both the kids really loved it, and had so much fun. It is quite a neat place to go. The lego structures they have built there are quite amazing, I wish I could build stuff like that. Jadon is much better at that kind of thing then his old man. There are much less crowds there too, than at Disneyland. That is something I really like. But I hate driving down south and especially through LA. There is always a huge bottleneck trying to drive through there. So on the way back, I had a great idea. We should start driving at 4AM to beat the traffic through LA (Legoland is about an hour or so south of LA). My wife totally revolted at that idea, however. We left at 8AM instead. But amazingly, there were no slowdowns driving through LA. It was truly a miracle. My wife said she was praying, specifically she said she prayed for “light traffic so my husband would not be a bear”. ha ha. Well, it sure worked.

This is another photo from my recent outing up to Grouse Lake with my friend, Rob. We arrived at the lake in time to enjoy the sun rising above the mountains. I love trying to get this sunstar effect in my photos every so often, it is pretty cool. To get this effect, I stopped my aperture down to f/20. The ice on the lake was pretty neat as well. But not thick enough to walk on or skate on. I didn’t try. But Rob did find some chunks of ice to throw across the lake. He’s just a kid at heart.

Well, I was trying to think of a good hike and place to go for sunrise. I had not been up in the Wright’s Lake area before, and thought it would be a good possibility. I talked my friend Rob into getting up at some ungodly hour and going along with me. Fortunately, he likes photography as well. We drove up to Wright’s Lake in the dark, and found snow on the road as we got closer to the lake. I was a bit surprised by this. I was hoping there would be snow on the mountain peaks, but I was not expecting snow on the road. This road is in-passable in the winter, but at this time of the year it was still ok. It did put us a bit behind schedule. I was still hoping we could hike up to Grouse Lake by sunrise. But I totally underestimated this hike. There was quite a bit of snow on the trail, which makes hiking quite a bit more difficult. It was not enough to need snowshoes, but it sure got our hiking boots soaking wet. It was also rather difficult to even see the trail at all, especially when it is dark. A bigger problem was that my GPS refused to work in the cold weather. Nice. Fortunately, there was another hiker who had gone up there before us, probably the day before. We followed in his footsteps, which made the hiking quite a bit easier. Nonetheless, we managed to lose the trail at least once, and ended up way off the trail, scrambling up a steep hill in snow that was quite deeper than you might think. We eventually found our way back to the main trail, but by this time it was already way past sunrise. Not only that but I could see that our destination, Grouse Lake, involved much more of an ascent than I anticipated. We were going to be arriving at Grouse Lake probably an hour or more after sunrise. Oh well. We still wanted to continue on up to the lake anyway. It would be a good hike, if nothing else.

When we finally arrived up at Grouse Lake, however, we were in for a really nice treat. The lighting was still very good, and the sun had not yet risen above the surrounding mountains. I told Rob that God must’ve stopped the sun for us, like he did for Joshua. Well not exactly, but it was a blessing, and I was quite surprised. I had mistakenly thought that the sun would hit Grouse Lake very early and from a different angle. But we had plenty of time to take some nice photographs before the sun finally got high enough above the mountains. The lake was lightly frozen over, which also made for a very beautiful setting. It was a fabulous morning in the Sierra Nevada.

Here’s yet another one from back in September at the Columbia River Gorge. This is the not too often visited Lancaster Falls. This photogenic section of the falls is about 20 ft. high, but it really is a huge waterfall. You just can’t see the upper sections of this waterfall unless you do a lot of fanagling and bushwhacking. I was battling with some little girls here as I was taking my photo. They were trying their darndest to get in front of me in my picture and play in the waterfall. Their parents were trying to keep them out of the way, but one of them did bang into my tripod. Ah well, I can’t blame them. It’s a beautiful waterfall.

This is the American River in Folsom, taken a couple weeks ago. It is a nice little spot just a hop, skip, and a jump from my home. You can hardly tell from my photo that there are three bridges here, plenty of telephone lines, multiple buildings, and a prison just up the way, all within view from this location. (btw, there was a big riot at the prison on the night I took this photo – lots of fire truck and ambulance activity going on). Anyway, I carefully composed this photograph to keep out all man-made objects. Not an easy task, but I managed it.

On Halloween night my kids went out to gather their loot with a couple friends. My wife went out with them, while I stayed on the home front to hand out tricks or treats to anyone who happened to come by (and eat whatever was left over). I also watched what was probably the craziest hockey game I have ever seen in the 35 years I have been watching hockey. My team, the Vancouver Canucks, were playing the Anaheim Ducks. It was probably too crazy to explain on this blog, you just had to see it to believe it. Goals were being scored back and forth between the 2 teams and all over the place until they got to the exciting shootout at the end of the game, in which neither team could score. The Canucks ended up winning the game 7-6 in the wild and wooly affair. It was definitely appropriate I think that the game was played on Halloween night.

Anyway, this shot of Wahclella Falls in the Columbia River Gorge is a bit different. It is a panorama of the waterfall consisting of four horizontal images stitched together to make a big vertical image about 33 megapixels in resolution, which would provide incredible detail in a large print. Not too shabby, eh.