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Mono Lake Photo Series

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Mono Lake CaliforniaMono Lake, California, sits at the western edge of The Great Basin, the expansive drainage area that lies between the Rocky Mountains in the east, and the Sierra Nevada range in the west. All lakes from Salt Lake in Utah across to Mono Lake in the west have no outlet to the sea and over thousands of years as a result of evaporation have become highly concentrated in salts.

Despite the waters of Mono Lake being too alkaline to support fish life, the waters abound with brine shrimp and alkali fly pupa which support millions of migrating birds.

Limestone towers known as "tufa" rise from the lake, formed by freshwater springs percolating up into the lake. The calcium in the fresh water combines with the carbonate in the lake water to form the calcium carbonate from which the tufas form. If you've ever been in limestone caves with stalagmites, you will recognize them as essentially the same things but formed by different processes.

In the photos of Mono Lake that I have published, you will see nature's dramatic primary color palette composed of a bright green lake and bright blue sky. It was quite a sight! I also did several of them as sepia-toned photos. And right there to the west is the very edge of the Sierra Nevada range. What a place! Get in a visit if you can some day.

By the way, if the bottom of the photos are cut off on your computer screen, did you know that by pressing the F11 key on your computer keyboard, you can hide your browser menu bars and get to see more of the picutures. When you're done, just press the F11 key again to show you menu bars again. This works for Internet Explorer - I'm not sure if it works the same with other browers.

Slide Show of Photos of Mono Lake

Read more about Mono Lake


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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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A Grunge Botanical Collection — Five Painterly Garden Pieces

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Over the past few weeks I've been building out a small collection of botanical pieces using photos taken in my garden here in Irvine, California, (and in one case out on a hiking trail here in SoCal), and using AI assistance to give each one a grunge, painterly treatment — dark, richly textured backgrounds with warm gold light breaking through, turning garden snapshots and trailside finds into something closer to old varnished still-life paintings than straight photography. Here's the full set so far. Epiphyllum oxypetalum — Queen of the Night, Painterly Botanical Art A night-blooming cactus that flowers just once or twice a year, for a single night — three blooms at different stages caught in one frame from a night it happened in my garden. Kangaroo Paw — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art Australia's velvety-flowered native, grown in my own garden, its stems reaching in different directions the way it actually grows rather than posed into symmetry. ...
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A Steindachner's Ebony Tarantula at Crystal Cove

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I crossed paths with this fellow on a hike at Crystal Cove State Park this morning, along the Fenceline trail. I posted it to iNaturalist as soon as I got home, and within a few hours had it confirmed by several people: a male Steindachner's ebony tarantula ( Aphonopelma steindachneri ). Turns out the timing wasn't a fluke. Males of this species leave their burrows specifically to search for mates between July and October, so this was a textbook-timed encounter rather than an unusual one — good to actually check that before assuming, since my first instinct was that a July sighting seemed early. After his photo session, I gently nudged him with a stick and he scurried off the trail into the chaparral, safe from being run over by a mountain biker or stomped by an arachnophobic hiker.  Aphonopelma steindachneri is native to the coastal ranges of Southern California and northern Baja California, and it's one of the tarantulas you're genuinely most likely to run into ...
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