Hoag Hospital Photo Contest

So a few friends of mine work at Hoag Hospital and mentioned a photo competition they were having to help decorate the newly remodeled hospital.  They were asking for Southern California's coastal flora, so I decided to send a few in that I had back from when I first tested out the 7D.  They apparently received 2000 entries, and from that they chose 100 winners.  Three of those were mine.

Kind of makes up for the fact that I forgot to submit anything to the OC Fair this year - unanimous rejection will have to wait til next year! 

O'Neil Park - or the Attack of the Ticks

A few weeks back, Anha and I took a trip out near my hood to O'Neil Park to try to find some waterfalls.  Well, it turns out you need rain for water, so that didn't work out, but we decided to take a hike and see if we found anything interesting.  We decided on the most gruelingly-named hike on the map - "Edna."

Here are the results:

There were a few of these weird seed pods...I'm gonna call them...  on the ground looked like dried up sponges.

Ah, Anha Nguyen, my partner in crime on  most of my photographic exploits - this is her  sporting her "hiking boots"

Thought this was a interesting contrast in texture and color

Over what seemed to be an endless hill was Rancho Santa Margarita

The only thing significant about this picture is that it was about this  moment that I realized it would be a good idea to start checking for ticks.   I think at first glance, I had 7 on my pants.

Shockingly, no lighting effects were added to this photo, that's actually the  sun behind it.

I was shocked that I got a pretty decent and sharp image of the moon in the  sky.  I upped all the blacks in the image above so you could see it better,  but it was still faintly daylight at the time I shot this.

So at this point I started playing around with the HD video in the 7D -  you'd be surprised how creepy it looks to watch a caterpillar munch  on a flower in slow motion.  Those things are pretty ugly.

Feeling rather proud of myself for having made it  through the wilderness, unscathed (aside from  having been attacked by probably 2 dozen ticks),  we called it a night and went back to my place to  check the pictures.  It was then that I realized I  hadn't removed ALL the ticks yet.  Sigh.