Since I moved to Reno in 2008, I've only spent one Thanksgiving with my family because they're 2000 miles away, and it's an expensive flight, but I started a tradition of heading to Lake Tahoe for a Thanksgiving sunrise before I start drinking beer and watching football. So even though I'm not going to have any turkey or mashed potatoes or stuffing or lemon meringue pie, I'm still thankful about a lot of things, especially about it only being a 45 minute drive to my favorite lake.

Tags:   Lake Tahoe Tahoe City pier sunrise dawn California Sierra Nevada

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Even though I live near a bunch of casinos and park at the Circus Circus when I teach classes at the University of Nevada, Reno, I'm not much of a gambler at all. Four or five times a year, I'll bet $10 on a football game, but that's about it. However, one thing that I will gamble on is the weather when it comes to my photography. When I was looking at weather.com last night, it said that there should be some partly cloudy skies around Pyramid Lake early in the morning, but it would start raining very shortly after sunrise. Since I woke up at 4:30 AM, I thought I would head up to Pelican Point to see how it would work out. It rained a little bit during the drive up but stopped a few minutes before I arrived. I had about 15 minutes of light like this, and then the clouds moved over the lake, and it started raining really hard. I really like this ragged, old pier and think I'll return again soon to give it another try.

Tags:   Pyramid Lake Nevada Pelican Point long exposure dawn morning pier ragged

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My grandfather used to use a not-politically correct saying about California to describe the weirdness of the state, but I don't think that he ever visited the Salton Sea, which in my opinion is the strangest part of the Golden State, at least geologically. In 1905, some engineers tried to divert a spur of the Colorado River to the Sonoran Desert for crop irrigation, but their plan didn't work out to their expectations, and they ended up flooding out an old dried lakebed. Thus, a new saline lake was created, and for a few decades, the location became a resort, vacation destination, but the saline water, without an outflow to the ocean, continued to become more and more salty, and most of the fish in the lake died.


This photo was made at a location called Bombay Beach, and these concrete rocks were once part of the support system for a boat dock. Below where I was standing to take this photo were thousands, if not millions, of fish bones. Today, most of the buildings are abandoned, but there are still about 200 people who live there. The closest gas station is 20 miles away, so most of the residents drive around on electric golf carts. I only spent one evening there, but I am hoping to go there for a few days in the future. There are a few decent documentaries that have been made about both the Salton Sea and Bombay Beach.

Tags:   California Salton Sea Bombay Beach Sonora Desert

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It was a good evening to photograph the cable cars in San Francisco. I still haven't got the shot that I want, but it will happen eventually.

Tags:   San Francisco California cable cable car Bay Area

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I'll admit that I've been on a giant HDR kick lately. Sometimes, I think it's really worked out for my images, but other times it seems like the stuff is just trendy and too phony to respect. So for this one, I decided to just try to work the heck out of one raw file to see how it'd look. I also have a black & white version that I could post.

Tags:   Lamellae Lake Ruby Mountains Nevada Great Basin Lamoille lake Liberty Pass

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