Lake Chabot Regional Park - Castro Valley, CA (Part 2)

From 7/16/2016 to 7/28/2016, I hit up three separate East Bay Regional Parks here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I visited Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, CA, Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont, CA, and Lake Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley, CA. I have an annual pass this year, so I do plan on taking more photography trips to these parks. I want to exercise and get fit so I can do a camping trip up in the Sierras here in California sometime. I've been thinking about a trip like that for a while now. Not to mention, I really need to loose some weight. Enough about me though, I am here to share the photos I took at the parks with you guys. I will be splitting the photos into several parts. I also shot video on my East Bay Park trips. You can view my vlog with the videos here. I hope you enjoy.

Full Resolution Photos: If you want to see full resolution photos of any of the photos you see here, use the following links. If you wish to purchase prints of any of the photos, please contact me here. To view my best East Bay Regional Park photos, use this link. To see my best monochrome and abstract photos for 2016, use this link. To see all of my photos from Lake Chabot Regional Park, use this link.

Parts:

• Redwood Regional Park - Oakland, CA
• Coyote Hills Regional Park - Fremont, CA
• Lake Chabot Regional Park - Castro Valley, CA: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | 

I took a total of 3 trips during July to Lake Chabot Regional Park. I will be splitting my photos from the trips into 3 blog posts. In this blog post, I will show you the rest of my scenery, flower, and close up photos from Lake Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley, CA that was shot on 7/19/2016.

A scenery photo of the vegetation and Lake Chabot shot from West Shore Trail. 

Approximate GPS location (type into Google) according to the Canon GP-E2 GPS Receiver: 37 43 29 N 122 06 38 W 

A scenery photo of Lake Chabot shot from West Shore Trail. 

A photo of Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) shot from West Shore Trail.  

 Black and white process of the photo above.

 A photo of weed shot from West Shore Trail. 

Photography Tip: The reason the background looks so dark is because the shot was underexposed and compensated with flash to isolate the subject. The light from your flash will fall off much faster so objects closer to your flash will get more light than objects further away. By doing this, your subject will be lit and the background will be darkened. The more distance between the subject and the background, the stronger the effect. I normally expose the shot manually (Manual Mode or M) and have the flash power on auto (E-TTL). 

Black and white process of the photo above.

A photo of weed shot from West Shore Trail.

 Black and white process of the photo above.

A photo of acorns shot from West Shore Trail. 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

 A photo of acorns shot from West Shore Trail. 

A photo of wild blackberry flowers on a wild blackberry bush. 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

A photo of wild blackberry leaves on a wild blackberry bush. 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

 A photo of wild blackberry on a wild blackberry bush. I did try a few and I saw some other visitors collecting and eating some too. These wild blackberries tend to be more sour and tiny (on occasion, you do get a sweet one) and the bush is covered in thorns. Also, wild blackberries have more of a laxative effect than domesticated blackberries. If you do go eat them, pay attention to how many you're eating!

A photo of a fallen tree and weed shot on East Shore Trail. 

Approximate GPS location (type into Google) according to the Canon GP-E2 GPS Receiver: 37 43 07 N 122 06 16 W 

A photo of flowers shot along East Shore Trail. I couldn't identify what flowers these are. If you know, please comment below.  

Black and white process of the photo above. 

A long exposure forest photo from East Shore Trail. 

Approximate GPS location (type into Google) according to the Canon GP-E2 GPS Receiver: 37 43 12 N 122 06 12 W 

Black and white process of the photo above.

This is all the photos for today. Next time, I will post the rest of my photos from Lake Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley, CA. I hope you have enjoyed the photos! Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Parts:

• Redwood Regional Park - Oakland, CA
• Coyote Hills Regional Park - Fremont, CA
• Lake Chabot Regional Park - Castro Valley, CA: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | 

Fruits In My Front Yard

Today I have seven photos of fruits in my front yard. I hope you enjoy viewing the photos.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: To see all of my at home/backyard photography photos, use this link.

 Had a few supermarket strawberries go bad on me so I through them in the front yard. I got a lot of strawberry plants growing in the front yard now. LOL Sadly, the snails and other wildlife seems to be better at getting to them before I do...

Photos of loquat on the loquat tree in my front yard. The squirrels and birds are also a pretty big issue with these fruits. 

Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Fruit Picking in Brentwood, CA

Brentwood, CA has many self pick farms. When the time is right, and the fruits are ripe, many farms open up for you to go in and pick the fruits yourself. A while back, I did just that out in the country side. While I didn't really pick much fruit (my friends and family did most of that), I did take some photos. Here are the photos I took on the trip out in the country side. Most of these photos are from Brentwood or from surrounding cities. I forgot my Canon GP-E2 GPS that day so I don't have exact locations for these shots.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. View my best Brentwood photos here. To see all the photos of my trip, use this link.

The first farm I was at was a cherry farm called "Nunn Better Farms". Here is a shot of some cherries on the tree.

A few portrait shot of trees at Nunn Better Farms.

In the parking lot of Nunn Better Farms, I spotted a nice shot of an adjacent field. I thought the lines in the field made really great lead-in lines, so I took a few shots from different perspectives.

After picking cherries my family and friends decided to go to a peach farm to go picking peaches. Not sure what the name is for this farm, but there were some run down buildings there that I thought would make a great shot. Above is a regular shot of one of the buildings. 

I then proceeded to take an HDR composition of the building from a different perspective. 

Photography Tip: HDR compositions are very useful with buildings like this. See how the "dark shadows" in the building are also lit up? You can do this without driving the noise up in the photo when doing this with a multiple exposure HDR composition. Just exposure bracket your shots in camera and then combine them into HDR using Photoshop in post. I enjoy processing them via the 32-bit process because the colors look more natural.

A few photos of the peaches on the farm. 

A shot of the peach field. I thought the gap between the trees made a great lead in line. Sadly the sky was not very good that day and it started to rain a little bit when I was about to leave. Pretty sure the shot would have been much better on a sunny day.

A shot of the road and a field adjacent to the farm. A drop of rain actually got on my lens and you can see it on the left. 

This is a shot I took on my way home. This is in Byron, CA of a river. Approximate location of this image was at 37.812242,-121.57854. Thanks Google Maps and Street View! The reason I was able to find the location of this one is because the river is very easy to spot on the map, plus I remembered what street it was. 

These are all the photos for today. I hope you have enjoyed viewing them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Bored at Home Macro

Maybe it is raining outside and you don't have anything to do. Maybe it isn't raining, but you go no where else to go. What do you do? Feel like taking photos? If you do macro photography, there are a lot of things you can take photos of! Just look around your house, I assure you will find something. :) Today, I want to show you some macro photos I took of objects around the house. All of these photos were taken with the help of my Kenko Extension Tubes and a few shots were lit using my Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT. Most of the photos here were taken with my new Canon EOS 5D Mark III except for one photo which I shot with my Canon EOS 7D. 

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. To see my best 2012 macro shots, use this link. To see all of my 2012 at home and backyard photography photos, use this link.

Photo of an orange's skin. This was the only shot taken using my Canon EOS 7D. I shot this photo using one of the fruits on my orange tree in my front yard. 

I sometimes solder up electronic circuits so I have quite some electronic components laying around. Here is a photo of a resistor I had lying around my parts bin. 

A photo of a spring I had lying in my parts bin. 

For this photo, I laid a US Dime (10¢) on a DVD that failed the burning process. The DVD creates the colorful background. If you want to see more of coin shots like this, I have some photos from a previous blog post on a US Quarter (25¢). 

Drops of water can always help spice up an image. I covered the back of the US Dime (10¢) with water and quickly gave the rest of the DVD a spray using my spray bottle. A spray bottle is always handy for macro photography, especially on flowers and leaves! 

Yum. Jelly Belly. That is right, I took a jelly bean out of my Jelly Belly jar to get a photo of it. Good thing I got through the shot with out eating it first. LOL

Here is another photo of the jelly bean. Just looking at this makes me want some now, which is exactly what I will be doing after I finish typing this sentence. 

I also found some LEDs in my parts bin. Here are a few photos. The above is of my green LED. 

Another photo of my green LED. 

After trial and error placing these 3 LEDs under my camera set up, I finally got it. Here is a photo of my red, green, and yellow LEDs. It takes a lot of time to set it up. Remember, the camera's angle of view is only around 3.5 cm across. You need patience and steady hands to set it up. 

These are all the photos for today. I hope you have enjoyed viewing them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.