We were at #donnerpass recently. The moon 🌝 was very bright and it created an opportunity for capturing something that shows a lit up subject as well as stars in the sky 🌌 . This is a single exposure. The bridge in the bottom foreground created even more depth. It was a beautiful night!

#mountain #nightsky #nightphotography #stars ...

Bathed in moonlight in the Tahoe National Forest. This may look like daytime but it is actually nighttime - the moon 🌝 was quite bright this weekend! Do you see the stars?

#tahoe #moonlight #stars #nightsky ...

The source of water for the Modesto Reservoir is the Tuolumne River, which begins high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The reservoir delivers up to 67,000 acre-feet per year of water to the City of Modesto, supplementing the City’s groundwater supply. Thousands of acres of the reservoir are also open to the public for recreational use like camping, fishing, etc. It’s a single exposure shot with very little post processing. It’s just a 3s exposure which makes the water ripples look smoothened out making it a good juxtaposition against the sharp background elements #modesto #california #modestoreservoir ...

A peek view of the Ferry Building and Coit Tower, while driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge!

#sanfrancisco #baybridge #california ...

Somewhere in Lassen Volcanic National Park!

#california #mountains #lassenvolcanicnationalpark #brokeoffmountain #snowman #snowperson ...

For years I have been flying north south across WA to CA and always choose my flight seat to get a view of Crater Lake in Oregon from up above. Had never visited it, always wanted to visit in the winter. Luckily, it has started snowing by now there when we visited recently. The lake was formed 7,700 years ago by a collapse of a volcano. At 1,949 ft / 594m it is the deepest lake in the US! We are standing at 7,100ft / 2,165m and temperature was 22°F / -5.6°C

#craterlakenationalpark #winter #oregon ...

Mount Shasta is called Úytaahkoo or “White Mountain” in the native language Karuk. It has an elevation of 14,179 ft / 4321.8 m. It’s located in California but is part of the Cascade Mountains that stretch all the way to Oregon, Washington and even Canada.

Driving alongside it, it was nice to see it appear from the shadows and the dark clouds.

#california #mtshasta #mountain #snow ...

Sunset in El Dorado Hills near Sacramento! Love all the shades of blue and yellow in here. It was right after the sun dropped.

El Dorado Hills is about 18.6 miles from the 1848 gold find site in Coloma, the impetus for the California Gold Rush. Gold was washed down the South Fork of the American River, into areas now in El Dorado Hills and Folsom, but farming and ranching supplanted the Gold Rush. Portions of two Pony Express routes in this area from 1860-1861 remain as modern El Dorado Hills roads.

#sunset #california #eldoradohills ...

This is quite surreal, because it is. The fires in California make the sun appear this way and the sky does its own thing too. I took this photograph in the Tahoe National Forest near Nevada city.

#tahoe #fire #sunset #smoke #wildfire #california ...

Bottom is right in the middle of the night. Top is an hour before dawn. It’s a time lapse of the Milky Way over some mountains. A couple of the images in this sequence are off. Can you tell which ones? #milkyway #collage #timelapse ...

Another unexpected guest on a macro shot 😊

#wildfowers #ant #macro ...

Can you believe we didn’t even know this comet existed until less than 4 months ago? And now we won’t see it again for 6700 years! C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) or Comet NEOWISE is a retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020, by astronomers during the NEOWISE mission of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. Under dark skies, it can be clearly seen with the naked eye and might remain visible to the naked eye throughout most of July 2020, at least until July 23, the point of the comet's closest approach to Earth at a distance of 0.69 AU (103 million km; 64 million mi). Comet NEOWISE made its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) on July 3, 2020, at a distance of 0.29 AU (43 million km; 27 million mi). This passage increases the comet's orbital period from about 4400 years to about 6700 years.

#comet #neowise #neowisecomet #astrophotography #nightphotography #nightsky #heavenly ...

I was hiking / climbing in the Tahoe National Forest and taking some pictures of the wildflowers when I suddenly noticed this tiny little thing on one of the petals. I only had a few seconds to get this photo and I got lucky to have it be in exact focus. Anyone know what this little guy is called?

#tahoe #macrophotography #insect #wildflowers #climbing #hiking #mountains ...

This is the lightest part of the main Milky Way band. I used stacking for this one (i.e. I merged 8 separate exposures into one) - something I have never done before. It’s supposed to reduce noise significantly, but I haven’t pixel peeped yet.

#milkyway #nightsky #california ...

Before sunrise!

#california #mountains #sunrise ...

Did you know that a pine cone is also called a conifer cone? A cone is an organ on plants in the division Pinophyta (conifers) that contains the reproductive structures. The familiar woody cone is the female cone, which produces seeds. The individual plates of a cone are known as scales. A pine cone is also an example of what some people consider sacred geometry. It has what is described as a sacred spiral (based on the fibonacci sequence), which is considered to be inherent in many things in nature, including, for example, a snail shell.

#pinecone #cone #sacredgeometry #sacredspiral #bw #macro ...

Beautiful day in the Sierra Nevadas at Sonora Pass, part of the Pacific Crest Trail

Please avoid crowds and crowded areas and practice safe distance.

#california #summer #mountains #snow ...

Went for a walk in the neighborhood. It was a grey rainy day. But there was a sea of these flowers next to the sidewalk. Do you know what these are called? Birds of Paradise!

Their official name is Strelitzia reginae and they are also known as crane flower. They are native to South Africa and derive their name from the unusual flowers, which resemble brightly colored birds in flight. In the United States, Florida and California are the main areas of cultivation, due to their warm climate. It is a common ornamental plant in Southern California, and has been chosen as the Official Flower of the City of Los Angeles.

#birdsofprey #flowers #california ...

This is a color photograph, with no filters, colorization, desaturation etc. This is what it looked like in the Bay Area on March 25. The heavy fog and the bright daytime sun created this very drab color palette. This is true to what it actually looked like to the naked eye.

If you look very carefully, you can also make out the very very faint outline of the Golden Gate Bridge all the way in the background. Can you see it?

#naturalgrayscale #bw #landscape #bridge #sanfrancisco ...

Sunset in San Francisco!
It was fog which helped filter out the sun’s brightness to enable this pic. Love how the relatively tack-sharp bird in the foreground helps contrast a bit with the haze and mist in the distance.

#sunset ...

Sunset from Berkeley Marina! That is the Golden Gate Bridge in the background #berkeley #marina #sunset #ggbridge ...

🌝 So when you lay your hands on a 600mm lens, you obviously have to take a pic of the moon. I tried but I couldn’t find Neil Armstrong’s steps in this pic 😇 But this is the closest optical photo of the moon that I have ever clicked. What do you think? #moon #fullmoon ...

We have been getting some decent sunsets this week in San Francisco. So that’s the jetty of the Berkeley Marina in the foreground and the Golden Gate Bridge across the Bay in the background. And right to the left of the sun is Alcatraz, the historical prison island! #sanfrancisco #sunset ...

We had an outstanding rainbow 🌈 in San Francisco this week! It physically terminated past the Emeryville marina at .... Treasure Island (😛)! No filters, it happened just before sunrise and mashed in perfectly with the misty, cloudy, golden glow. Oh, and do you see the faint outline of Alcatraz in the center back?

#rainbow #sanfrancisco #bayarea #emeryville #lifeisbeautiful ...

💥🎇 A great start to 2020! Happy New Year everyone! 🌠✨ We just saw the Northern Lights! We got lucky! Really lucky! That dreamy, moonscape terrain is the Arctic Ocean, mostly frozen. The Arctic Circle is at 66° 33'N, we are at 70°N at the moment, at the Northern most point of USA, still around a 1,000+ miles from the North Pole!

It has been 100% cloud cover and snowing and it is -15F / -26C with crazy wind chill. Three-to-five seconds is the maximum time I can un-glove my hand before I start to lose sensation. Camping out in the cold and waiting for the clouds to open up has been quite an ordeal 🥶 But it was totally worth it, patience pays 😇

#happynewyear #northernlights #alaska #winter #auroraborealis ...

Did I tell you I like glaciers? Because I do 😊

For this who may not know:
glaciers are basically rivers of ice and they move a lot more slowly, just a few feet a day. Over the last few decades, these glaciers have started to recede a lot. There are 616 named glaciers in Alaska.

#alaska #matanuska #glacier #winter ...

Until now I had always been on alpine glaciers, which are glaciers that hang off the peaks of mountains. This glacier, Matanuska, is a valley glacier as it exists on a valley. But unlike a snowfield that just sits and melts, this is indeed a glacier that moves by a foot every day as it “flows” downwards along the valley. It was fascinating to see all the different glacial features from up close. I chose this picture because it showcases the most information - we see the blue ice, the black ice (yes what looks like dark rock is actually just pure ice), the morraines, parts of crevasse, all with people to scale.

#glacier #alaska #matanuska #hike ...

With a depth of 1,949 feet (594 m), Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest in the United States. It partially fills a nearly 2,148-foot (655 m)-deep caldera that was formed around 7,700 (± 150) years ago by the collapse of the volcano Mount Mazama. There are no rivers flowing into or out of the lake; the evaporation is compensated for by rain and snowfall at a rate such that the total amount of water is replaced every 250 years.

#craterlake #oregon #lake #crater #caldera #bw #aerial ...

Teriberka, in Russia, during the Polar Winter!

It was densely cloudy so the bottom yellow is the city lights being reflected back, and the top green halo? You guessed right. Yes. Aurora Borealis! Not the best view of the Northern Lights themselves but so interesting nonetheless!

#teriberka #russia #northernlights #arctic #polar ...