Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Mission Carmel Bell Tower

This is from the inner courtyard at the Carmel Mission. I believe the tree with the white blossoms is a Flowering Pear Tree. This is thier time of year. There are some around here that are pure white with so many blossoms you can't see their leaves.

Monday, February 2, 2009
Father Junipero Serra

Before we drove down Highway 1 yesterday we stopped at the beautiful Carmel Mission. It was a great place to wander with my camera. We have tried to make it into the mission on several previous trips to the area but our timing was always off. I'm glad we made it this time. The grounds on the inside were much bigger than I thought.

This is a statue of Father Junipero Serra, founder of nine of the twenty-one California Missions.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Christmas Eve at Saint Angela's

Well the holidays are over for the most part. Too quickly as usual! But maybe it will give me a chance to share a few of the thousands of images I've taken in the last few months.

A couple of days before Christmas we were taking pictures outside of this beautiful little church in Pacific Grove. They have a nice nativity scene and we have stopped here on previous trips this time of year. This time, however there were still people inside getting ready for Christmas. When they saw us outside they invited us in. They were obviously working hard on the Christmas preparations. Much like the elves in our church, it seemed like there was always someone there working on a project. Unfortunately they were not quite done with the Christmas decorations. So they invited us to come back Christmas Eve day when there would be light coming through the stained glass too.

This is one of the images from our return trip. There are many more to come!

Saturday, May 10, 2008
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish 360° view

Back to Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Montecito. This was actually the first image I took with my new panoramic tripod head. But as I mentioned in an earlier post it took me a bit of time to finish all of the shots and in the time it took the light had changed quite a bit. I did not think I was going to be able to stitch it together right. But now that I have had a little practice I was able to get it to work.

Of course that brought up some new problems. The image is so large I kept getting "Hard drive full" errors. Strange seeing as how there was 500 gig of space. In the end I realized that the format of the hard drive only allows a maximum of four gigabyte files. Yeah, it's a big picture... ten feet wide actually.

Thursday, January 10, 2008
Our Lady of Mount Carmel

My intent was to get some nice sunset shots of this beautiful church in Montecito. I was a little late, but it was still a nice night.

If you tilt your head to the left and use your imagination a little you can make out half of the constellation Orion rising from behind the church.