For Christmas, my beloved Mr. Wonderful presented me with two fantastic Peter Lik photo books, one a Limited Edition photo book of his work in Las Vegas and beyond, as well as a book dedicated solely to Vegas. I always stop into Lik’s galleries in Vegas and Hawaii (those are the places I tend to travel most) to see some awe-inspiring landscape images, and are they ever. The Vegas galleries are really inspiring after a few cocktails. While looking through these awesome images, I was struck by the photos of Palm trees in Vegas. Being a Southern California resident who loves to visit Sin City, I must say I rarely look up to enjoy the beauty of the luscious palms. I don’t think I do that at home either.

Anyhow, while visiting the San Fernando Mission last week, I did precisely that: looked up. It’s amazing what you see up there:

I liked the idea of this solitary palm and bright blue sky. I just did a little bit of editing in Lightroom 3.

I loved the juxtaposition of the building and the palm tree. The color contrasts really grabbed me.

This might be my favorite palm tree image of the day. I know that one of the photographic “rules” is to have odd quantities of objects in photos, but I really liked how the breaking of this rule worked out for this pair. The bright blue sky and the greens just grabbed my attention.

Of course there are other trees in Southern California. One of my out of town visitors pointed this out:

This looks to be a Ceiba tree. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Of course I had to get a macro shot of those thorns:

I had an image previous to this one that was tighter on the tree, but the thorn was just too...shocking.

Thank you Mr. Wonderful for inspiring me with my Christmas gifts.

And thank you as always for stopping by!

I live really close to the San Fernando Mission. I have even attended Mass there. However, getting there with my camera proves to be impossible. Some visitors from out of town prompted me to go there, and I don't think I have gone there since I dove into photography. I am ashamed to say this not only because it is a gorgeous place to photograph, but it is also an important part of California's history. Basically in my back yard.

Knowing that I would be visiting there, did I bring my SLR? Of course not! It was close to noon, so the lighting would be crap. I had only my iPhone and my mini-me (point and shoot).

Here are a few photos taken with and edited in my iPhone:

Above are a couple of mosaics from a series of along one of the walls of the Mission library. Both photos were edited with the iPhone Photogene app to do some minor color correction.

This is a photo of the main fountain, which is a replica of the original. I edited this photo using the Best Camera app so that I could bring out the texture in the image.

I am making it a goal for 2011 to get back there for a photography outing. I look forward to posting the photos from that outing on my blog.

Thank you for sticking with me into the new year!