Evening Storm

The front was coming in last night so I grabbed the camera and took photos for about 3 minutes before the blowing rain drenched the porch.  I did get one interesting shot though.

It isn't one of the huge, impressive lightning bolts, but we get those very, very rarely up here in the mountains.

July 4th Events

It's time again to celebrate the birth of the U.S. and the quirkiness of Park City.  The Fourth of July!

After six weeks without so much as a drop of rain, the morning starts with heavy rain and dense clouds. While we desperately needed the rain, the timing wasn't appreciated. It did manage to stop about 30 minutes before the 5K run.

Since my knee doc told me to stop running, I have mostly obeyed.  The only runs I have done since September of last year are a couple of 3-milers with Julie.  Not exactly a robust training plan. Somehow I managed to run it in 24:17, which is right around 7:50 miles.  I was happily surprised.

Julie ran the course with Sally and Hannah ran it with Monty.  Hannah had some stomach issues that slowed her down, but she still finished under 25 minutes.

Every year the parade is a mix of interesting, well thought out floats and some cars and vans that have 10 minutes worth of decorations heaved on.  The parade invariably starts late goes on for about an hour and a half.

In a town full of Olympians, it is easy to find one to be the grand marshal of the parade.  This year it was Ted Ligety, who had a tremendous ski racing year.

If you could give an award to a single person, instead of a float or a group, it would have to go to this woman who was dancing along with a New Orleans style band.  She was pretty, dressed well, and danced with an energy that made me wonder what she was like way back at the beginning of the parade.

If you have a house along the parade route, all it takes is an email invite and you become party central.  These folks were right across the street from us.

I couldn't even get all of our group in one shot.  I think I took down about 15 chairs in the morning and more arrived later.

We had Benson's, Covaleski's, Herr's, Luaghton's, Jester's, Pierce's, Lutzker's, and probably some I am forgetting.

Allison and Stephen Pierce had a 5 gallon bucket full of water and were using it to reload a super-soaker water gun.  Apparently the bitter, angry, spoilsport Park City Police decided that they must be terrorists and emptied the bucket.

After dumping their water, Stephen got a lengthy lecture.

I love the little dog out in front dressed as a micro reindeer.  Tough sled to pull.

Many of you may have shopped online from Backcountry.com.  They are a huge outdoor retailer. Kind of like REI, but all online.  Their headquarters is here in Park City.  I give them credit for pulling a skier on the pavement.  I wonder if one pair of skis made it the whole way.  Notice their goat logo on the door of the car.

Well, they brought quite a few goats to match the logo. This was one of the larger ones.  I wonder if they keep their own logoed herd.

I almost captured a serious "fail".  The karate school was demonstrating nunchucks, spinning them rapidly.  One guy wanted to sneak through and nearly caught a stick to the head from both sides. Stupid is as stupid does.

I spend some time taking photos thinking about perspective.  Things in the distance appear smaller.

However this was a trick.  The girls in the distance actually were quite a bit smaller.

Nice push-me, pull-you van.

Sally and Monty, with Hannah standing behind. Notice her 2nd place ribbon from the 5K run.  No, I didn't get a ribbon.  All I got was a crappy t-shirt that instantly went in the donation box.

The group I have been rowing with is called the Park City Rowing Academy.  They are focused on teaching teenagers to row and they never mix the skilled youngsters with us struggling adults.  For their float, they were sweeping an 8 in the air.

Sally, Julie and Hannah, all looking happy and a lot more refreshed than they did when they crossed the line for the 5K a few hours earlier.

My gorgeous wife and I.  Thanks for the photo Sally!

I didn't take any more pictures during the day.  We went to the Benson's  great barbecue and although I had my camera all set up, I blew off the fireworks, preferring more eating and drinking to hiking in the dark.

Our first garage sale

Julie and our neighbor Sally decided they would have a multi-family garage sale.  By the time they were done, Loris and another neighbor Julie had joined in. They advertised it well and put signs everywhere.  I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who came by.  After all, we don't live on the way to anything else.  There is no such thing as "drive by business" where we live.

By the time we were done, Julie and I had sold about $700 worth of stuff and more importantly, got rid of some of the things that had been sitting around gathering dust.  It also prompted me to list about five other things on either eBay or Craigslist.  Cleaning house and making money!

We were lucky with nice weather, although it was getting quite hot near the end.  They decided to run it from 8:00-1:00.  No matter how consistently you say that, people will start showing up at 7:00.  By noon, the traffic stopped almost completely, so we called it quits a little early.

Thanks to Julie and Sally for their hard work.  Thanks to Bill and Loris Benson for the use of their tables.  I'm not sure how you do this without a good set of tables.

Just the same, I will be quite happy if we don't have to do this again for a long while.

Supermoon goes hiding

I figured I had four chances to capture the full moon, or at least almost full: moon rise and moon set on the day of and the day after.  I really like moon set on the day after because the sun is coming up and you catch sun rise and moon set together.

The end result was Clouds - 3, Steve - 1.  One of the pissers of living in the mountains is that you get low clouds that form as the air gets forced up and over the peaks.  Most of the sky can be a gorgeous blue, but sure enough, there is a row of thick clouds that gobble up the sun and moon as they drop down.

This is yesterday's moon dropping behind Park City Mountain Resort's Crescent and King Con lifts.

Oh well, there is a full moon about once a month.  I will try again (and again, and again).

Kicking off summer with Savor the Summit

It just keeps getting bigger.  More restaurants.  More people at each one.  This year we took a group of 17 people and dined with Silver, a restaurant about half way up Main Street.  Main Street was closed down and full of tables, serving dinners to about 3,000 people.  What a great way to celebrate the Summer Solstice.

After dinner, the party moved inside where it was warmer.  Although there were dozens of restaurants to chose from for your meal, it turns out Silver happened to be the big place for dancing afterwards.  It was absolutely packed.

The dance floor was hopping and the DJ was excellent.  You can tell we were having a good time.  That's Loris up dancing next to the DJ.

Eventually we left the place to all the 30 year olds.

It was a fun time but its success may make it less interesting for us.  It is getting very expensive and difficult to find a place that can handle our larger groups.

Why use Adobe's Lightroom?

I am a big proponent of Adobe's Lightroom software to import, catalog, edit, and export photos.  I copied this piece from PictureCorrect Photography Tips.  I think the final result is overdone, but it gives you a great before and after contrast.  This really can be done with Lightroom in about 2-3 minutes.

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Starting with the “before” image below, Ramelli adjusted his photograph using the following Lightroom workflow:

Before:

1.       Open up shadows with the Shadows slider.

2.       Bring down highlights.

3.       Add a gradient filter to sky to lower exposure and add yellow and magenta tints.

4.       Set the white and black points (hold down option key while using the sliders).

5.       Adjust the white balance.

6.       Add vibrance and saturation to make the photo pop.

7.       Re-adjust the gradient filter in the sky for color and exposure.

8.      Add a second gradient filter at the top of the frame to add more blue and create a vignette effect.

9.       Boost the saturation using the color controls.

10.   Crop and level the image to improve the composition.

11.    Use spot healing to remove distractions.

12.    Dodge and burn specific elements with the brush tool.

13.    Use the lens correction options to remove chromatic aberration and enable profile correction.

14.    Add a post-crop vignette.

15.    Use the noise reduction tool to reduce graininess.

16.    Add sharpening and use masking to keep the sky soft.

17.    Adjust clarity.

18.   Adjust the image’s contrast.

After:

This tutorial demonstrates what a difference a few minutes of adjustment in Lightroom can do to enhance a photograph without the use of any other post-processing software.

Rowing continues

I continue to get better at rowing, but this morning was a bit of a different adventure.  Three things came together:

• It was only 36 degrees. You get to wander around in the water getting the shells rigged.  Feels much chillier when those body parts get out of the water.
• The wind was blowing, making it pretty choppy.  It would throw a canoe around a little bit but these shells aren't nearly as stable as a canoe.
• Today was my first day out of the training shells and into a racing shell.  The training shells are wider and more stable. I sure was missing that stability as the waves rolled by.

All together, that made it a day where focus and balance were quite important.  Definitely not a good day to turn the boat over and go for a swim.  I am slowly getting more and more of my effort into boat motion and speed.  It is starting to feel closer to real rowing.

A tip to reduce spam

Ever want to take advantage of some offer on the Internet but they want to send you a confirmation email first?  You hate to give them your address because you can count on some follow-up spam and who knows how many people they will sell you address to.  My answer:

Just go to Guerrilla Mail.  When you get to this page, you are assigned a completely random email address that you can copy to the clipboard and paste into whatever page is asking you for an address.  When they send you your confirmation email, it will pop up on the Guerrilla Mail page. Read it.  Click on links.  Whatever you have to do.

Works like a charm and you never have to worry about the spam that will invariably be sent to that temporary address.

I suggest everyone bookmark the Guerrilla Mail web site!

Cambria to Carmel to home, a farewell

It was tough to leave a house where this is the view out your master bedroom window, and the big views were from the living room and kitchen!

Gas prices in California are high and we were staying in a resort town.  Wow!  That's over a dollar a gallon higher than Park City and we pay too much.  Thankfully, we had a rental Camry which was very roomy but still sipped gas.  We were getting over 30 mpg.

One evening we drove the 30 miles to San Luis Obispo to look around and then dine with friends from Park City (part timers) Paul and Kristen.  We ate at Novo SLO, which is a wonderful restaurant.

I snapped a quick shot in Bubblegum Alley. This artistic landmark is about 100 feet long and it is completely full of stuck on gum, end-to-end and top-to-bottom.  Interesting, but disgusting.

We drove on up the coast to spend one night in Carmel before heading to the San Jose airport.  The shoreline between Big Sur and Carmel has to be one of the prettiest in the world.   Big waves, steep cliffs, blue-green water, black rocks and interesting trees all come together.

The Cyprus trees have all sorts of interesting shapes.  It amazes me that anything lives so long in such cold, salty mist.

I love all the little coves with their sandy beaches.

But among all the pretty beaches, this one may be the most impressive.  We stopped in Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park for a quick hike.  In addition to the normal scenery, we had these huge flowers blooming just below the trail.  I wish we were allowed to get down to the beach.

What you can't see in the photo above is the waterfall that is cascading down onto the beach. I would guess it is about 75 feet high and they say it flows all year.

A great trip. I think the only thing we would definitely do differently is to come in October or November instead of June.  The heavy fog that rolled in every day can happy at any time, but apparently peaks during the "June Gloom".   As you can see from all the trip's pictures, we had enough sunshine to see everything we wanted.

Now we settle in for the incredible Park City summer.  No more planned travel for a few months.

Cambria - a day of animals

Today was a day of wildlife surprises.  We decided to go for a long walk through the Fiscallini Preserve, through the Cambria neighborhoods, and then to Main Street for some Linn's Olallieberry pie.  The pie was worth the 7.5 miles walk and hopefully the walk countered the calories in the pie, or at least some of them.

I had all my camera gear and was hoping to see some wildlife in the preserve.  There wasn't much, Just the same seals that we saw the other day and I would have to climb down some cliffs to get good shots of them.  Julie did see a four foot snake slowly inching across the path.  Not the surprise animal we would prefer to run across but he was completely uninterested in us. A passerby thought he was a gopher snake.

I put the camera back in my pack and we started into the neighborhoods, at which point we saw wildlife everywhere.

A word of warning, the last photo (after the heron) is pretty gross.  You may chose to skip it, or at least not dwell on it.  I included it because I thought it was interesting and unique.

This neighborhood is full of deer.  I guess they prefer the taste of people's yard plantings to the dry grasses and pine trees of the preserve.  Mom and her two little ones started very close to us but I had lazily decided to put my camera away. Live and learn.

Across the street and up the hill were two young bucks, both sporting their nice soft, fuzzy antlers. We ran across more deer as we kept walking and all seemed familiar enough with people so that they just casually walked away from us.

As we peaked the hill and headed into different terrain, we saw a half dozen Acorn Woodpeckers.  I believe this is a life bird for me but I have lost track.  The picture was taken from a long ways off and cropped a lot, but I didn't want to spend time chasing them for a close-up.  Just enough to identify them later.

We went out to dinner last night and finished up in time to get back to the house to see what was looking like a pretty poor sunset.  Foggy with no clouds to catch the sunlight makes for a very dull view.  Still, I grabbed the camera and walked across the street to see if I could get a decent shot.

Almost immediately, I saw this Great Blue Heron on the bluff right above the ocean.  He was dead still, probably hunting bugs or small rodents in the grass.  I very, very slowly crept towards him, taking pictures as I went.  When I took this shot, I was standing about 12 feet from him.  He was still absolutely frozen.  I began to believe that someone had placed an incredibly lifelike statue out there to screw with people like me. Then he turned his head.

I watched him for a while and saw him catch something, but I couldn't tell what. Too bad the light was so low that his sudden motion was impossible for me to freeze.  Herons can stand like statues but they strike like lightening when they are ready.

I took one last heron silhouette to capture my only sunset picture of the evening.

Now the gory photo, so stop here if you want to.



This was actually a surprise we discovered the morning before on Moonstone Beach.  A dead seal had washed up with the high tide.  It was interesting that its body was intact (but only for another day or so) but its head was down to the bare skull.  The good news is that it washed away with the next high tide.  If it sat in the sun much longer, it would have been an unbelievably disgusting mess.

We ended up seeing a lot of wildlife, just not what or where we expected. That's what makes it and adventure!

This morning we leave Cambria and head up the coast for a quick night in Carmel, then back to Park City.