03.31.11
Another photo trip… POPPIES!
So after much discussion and debate, Barb and I decided to hit the good state of California for our first attempt at Poppy photography. Barb flew out early to spend time with her son and his family and i joined up with her wednesday night. My flight wasn’t overly exciting despite the fact that the 2 Midwestern gals in the opposite row were partying it up and actually had to be cut off, BUT the sunset that night was absolutely amazing. A good omen for our photo trip…. so after a very long wait to get my rental car, i was finally on my way towards Pasadena to hook up with barb for a quick night of sleep before we headed north.
Our plan for the first full day was to meet up with a local photographer, Brent R. Paull of American West Photography, who we’d convinced to give us a private tour of the area. After a quick meet and greet in Gorman, we were on our way. Since we were a little early and the weather has been a bit crazy the flowers weren’t peaking quite yet and the flowers aren’t always where Brent thought they would be. So no beautiful Gorman hills of pastel color, but maybe another year!
We continued on towards Lancaster and the Antelope Valley hills where we got our first glimpse of color… off in the distance we saw large patches of bright orange. Just beautiful and gave us hope that we’d find good patches of color ourselves to photograph. Shortly after that we started seeing poppies alongside the road and then more and more patches as we drove.
After this taunting and excited peek at why we came all this way, we turned onto a dirt road and started driving a bit off the beaten path and made our first stop. Here Barb and I finally got to get back into what we call photo mode and boy were we in heaven. Poppies and goldfields filled our viewfinders and we played around with macro and ultra wide lenses… attempting to make images that live up to our own expectations ( we do expect to make coffee table books you know, haha).
After some time exploring this first area, we decided to move on… we stopped just a minute later for another lovely collection of poppies in the sage, but this time i found some yellow poppies!
And yet again just a few minutes beyond that location we found a field of poppies with what we think are cream cups that we just fell in love with – the purple, whites and oranges… we shot for some time but decided to feed our rumbling bellies and continue on with our tour.
After a yummy lunch we headed north to find some california oaks and possibly some baby blue eyes… the road past Caliente was quite steep and windy, but super fun to drive while we scoped out our options. We made a few stops to check out the valleys, oaks, and a decent patch of the blue eyes surrounded with popcorn flowers. We found some lupine and had to do a few grab shots along the way as well, Brent was quickly learning our lingo 
Our first bit of true excitement of our trip came when we crossed the railroad tracks, right as the lights were going and the arms were coming down… i started to pause but then gunned it thinking we had plenty of time. We were fine, but did notice that the train was in sight and was a bit scary. Won’t do that again!
PARA HERE – NOTE i wrote more but the blog isn’t liking it- so i’ll update later w/ the full paragraph!.
Our final leg of our tour took us on our way to Arvin, while the fields there have too many tall weeds due to all the rain we didn’t leave completely empty handed… we saw a bobcat!
While not all areas were postcard perfect, this was exactly what we’d hoped for – a great tour of the area with some insight to areas we might further explore in our next few days in the area…