Vallejo, California is on the northeast extremity of San Francisco Bay, with ferries running to San Francisco. I recently found the ferry terminal to be an interesting place to eat lunch, and I used the opportunity to take pictures — of course. I wanted to take a panorama of the scene outside the large windows. My first attempt lacked a few things, like a ferry and people. In mid-sandwich I saw the ferry arrive and went back to the spot for another try. In the meantime a man had taken up a chair in the corner, and I only had to wait another moment for cyclist to take a position.

Point Lobos is one of the world’s beautiful places, and every visit has photo opportunities. There is one spot where low tide reveals rock strata with tide pools, ideal for closeups. I was tired from lugging around an SLR with a lens assortment, and acquainted with the old-guy-on-slippery-rocks-while-balancing-equipment problem, I walked around with just my pocket camera. That works great for closeups because the camera focuses very close and is easy to hold with one hand. A shot of the general scene proved irresistible, and that led to some Adobe Photoshop™ retouching of original images that could have been better.

Last week it was problems with uncooperative seagulls. This week a different problem, and with a flighty hawk. At our local Coyote Hills Regional Park I saw the hawk perched in a distant walnut tree and zoomed the lens on my pocket camera (a Nikon P7000) in time to get a picture of him taking flight. After taking the picture I realized I had zoomed too much and just gotten the tree top. A misty landscape is not to be overlooked, so I took a second image to splice into a an odd-sort of panorama — there are not too many panoramas taken with a telephoto. The splicing turned out to present challenges.

The sun is bright but low to the horizon, and that marks photos as being in the late fall or early winter. Here in California there are reasonably warm days into November and December, so people still go the beach on good days. The surf is picking up from distant storms, and sun, surf, and people are the ingredients of photos. A recent lunch hour visit turned out to be an exercise in timing and composition. Neither small children nor incoming waves take direction well.