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!