Lightswitches at the Farallon House

For the past couple weeks and for the next six weeks, I'm living on the Southeast Farallon Island doing an internship for PRBO studying seabirds on the island. For more info, and most of the pictures I'm taking of the wildlife, visit: http://research.pomona.edu/karnolab/(it's actually Professor Karnovsky's lab blog that all her research lab students contribute to, but for this summer its mostly me).

Anyway, the house I'm living in (which is at least 120 years old, by the way), has been lived in by biologists since i think the 60's or 70's. I noticed something cute about the house...










the lightswitches are awesome!

Half Moon Bay beaaaach

Zach and I went to the beach!

I played in the water


He did too


and the sun set

the City of Foster City: lagoon

My sister Brittany and I shot some photos by the Foster City lagoon at Leo J. Ryan Park

Brittany

Brittany took an interest in the clouds, she took this one

And this one

This one too

The water had cool texture - it was super windy

Brittany tried a slower shutter speed for this flowing look of the water

Faster shutter speeds catch the split instant of ripples

Brittany tried fast shutter speed and low F-stop on this one

F-stop 1.8


Two duckies

a final tomorrow means procrastination today

It's such beautiful weather here today!

Annie, laying next to me. She's wearing a swim suit

Annie took a picture of me

the essentials: keys, id, phone

Annie's feetsies

Zach dropped by to say hi

a Nautical BBQ

Some friends and I had a nautically-themed BBQ yesterday!

Annie striking a pose

Gabe on the phone

the men, having issues getting the coals to light

Gabe, dousing everything with lighter fluid

Guest Photographer: Emilio Medina

a random photo my friend Emilio took haphazardly that ended up pretty nice, when he was teaching me a little about photography

An lesson with white balance

This is a little lesson in "white balance". This leaves on this tree, in real life, were extremely vibrant in its yellow-green colors, and seemed to jump out against the dim, dull, cloudy sky.

This is a picture with the white balance set to zero. It looks normal and boring, and doesn't capture the vibrancy of the colors.

This is the same tree with the white balance set to -2. It looks like a scary horror movie where someone is going to be murdered. A lot of the color is gone.

This is the same tree with the white balance set to +2. It looks blown out and the colors have also lost their vibrancy because the light takes over.

This is the same tree with the white balance set to +1. It's not perfect, but its better than zero or +2. To get the colors right, you need a little photoshop.
This is the product of 30 seconds of photo-editing. With more time, you could photoshop the sky blue and make it look more like california and less like the a land shrouded in clouds of doom