Photography, Cats, Nature and Life

Sunset in Laguna Beach, the New iPhone 13 Pro Max, Lounging Cats, Lightroom Glitches, Dahlias, and a Praying Mantis

A Week in Photos

“Sorry you have to drive so far,” I said to the Uber driver, who was dropping us off at a friend’s house in Laguna Beach. “But maybe you’ll get a good sunset.”

We knew that our friend had inherited this house from his dad, who bought it for $45,000 in the 1960’s. Our friend had grown up in it and was now raising his own kids in it. What we did not know was that it was in “Top of the World,” an area of Laguna Beach in which you aren’t quite sure that you are still on solid land — it looks as if you are viewing the coastline beneath you from the vantage of an airplane. Let’s just say that the little beach shack from the 60’s is worth a lot more than $45,000 today. And I think that the driver probably enjoyed the sunset.

Our friend and his girlfriend poured us glasses of champagne and we set up for cocktail (and photography) hour on the balcony. I took oodles of photos with my Nikon, but I’m only sharing my iPhone photo here, partly because I got the new iPhone 13 ProMax and I wanted to test it out, but also because I am in the midst of a nightmare called Lightroom Classic right now.

When I first started with Lightroom, a couple of years ago, I did not understand the difference between Lightroom Creative Cloud and Lightroom Classic. I became quite proficient at the cloud version, but, it does not work when you don’t have internet. I could, and probably will, write a whole article about this switch-over process, but l will leave it at this for now — just start with Lightroom Classic and never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever sync your catalogue with the Lightroom CC catalogue.

I also ran out of room on my desktop for all of my photos. Who would have thought that 3 TB could go so fast? But there are a couple of novels, a book about science and Eastern Philosophy, a lot of poems, and a LOT of RAW photos on there. So, now I see the spinning wheel of death (not enough hard drive) on a daily basis.

So, what’s a girl to do?

Well, I gathered up all of my (and my husband’s) old camera gear from over the last two decades. And I sold it! And I made enough to buy a new laptop with 8 TB of storage.

I have to admit I shed a few tears when my D500 got wrapped up in bubble wrap. She’s been with me to India, Austria, Romania, Norway, Paris, Alaska, and many places in the Pacific Northwest and Arizona. We had become somewhat inseparable.

But, unfaithful me, I moved on to the mirrorless (so much lighter) Nikon z7II. And I felt so bad that my D500 was just sitting in the closet. So I wrapped her up and gave her a little blessing that she would end up in the hands of some young photographer somewhere who would take her to many more amazing places.

And I made enough money to buy a new computer. Who knew all of that old gear would be worth so much? Plus, it just makes me feel good that someone might be able to use it.

We’ve had a few chilly days lately — well, chilly for Southern CA. For twenty years, I’ve dreamt of a fireplace in my office (which, for most of those years was really just a glorified hallway).As you can see, Freyja and Bisou really approve of the double-sided fireplace addition.

The new iPhone’s cameras are much bigger than the previous versions.’ And the optical zoom is 3x now, instead of 2.5, which does give you a surprisingly lot more telephoto range. This next photo was taken at 3x from the mountain biking trail the other day. I saw the full moon rising up over the treeline and, even though it was starting to get pretty dark (the photo is not great because of the shadows and I deleted all the pictures but this one), I snapped a few shots.

And I hopped off my bike at one more sport on the trail and took this one too:

I also played around with a few flower photos. The dahlias are quite glorious right now — all ruffled tutu layers and candy-stripes.

And here’s a little Mexican Lavender, shot with the new, built in, macro lens.

This little grasshopper rode inside the house aboard the hummingbird feeder, which I had brought in for re-filling. So he was escorted back into the garden, where he sat still enough for a few moments for me to take his photo.

I have to say that the absolute highlight of the week was that my new slippers showed up. I have the identical allbirds slippers from last year, but, they aren’t looking quite as fresh and fluffy as these ones.

I hope that you all had lovely weeks. As always, I thank you Dennett for creating this “week in photos” challenge. I’ve once again exceeded the SNAPSHOTS word count limit, so I’m sharing this in my own little pub, Butterfly Dreams, this week.

It’s so fun to share about the week and to read about so many other photographers’ weeks around the world.

You might want to check out a few of the others who participate:

Dennett /Anne Bonfert /Eileen Vorbach /Lisa Bolin /Tracy Aston /David Wade Chambers/ Mia Verita /Kim Zuch /Barbara Radisavljevic /LensAfield /Barbara Dalton /Sasha Meyer /Susan Alison /Diana Lotti /Barbara Dalton /K. Barrett /June Nguyen /Juan O. Aguilera /Ellie Jacobson /Shruthi Sundaram/ Pene Hodge /Tracy Aston/ Sandra Barrett and more… (if I’ve failed to mention your name, please let me know so that I can add it in future weeks).

I hope you enjoyed my photos and musings. You might also like:

Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.