Dartblog

The sunrise this morning over the Fogarty winery on Skyline Drive in Woodside, California.

Of course the great thing about Thomas Fogarty, the Stanford doctor who built the winery, is that he invented a new sort of catheter. It was used, first, to save people’s lives by removing clots. Then it was used to make better wine.

The elevation here is around 1800’; as Mr. Fogarty’s vineyard slopes downward this shot reveals glints of Silicon Valley, behind which is the easterly set of hills that frame the vale.

Skyline Drive is a wonderful stretch of road that belts latitudinally the Russian Ridge appellation of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is about seven miles due inland from the Pacific, which sea can be glimpsed from roughly this spot, just opposite my position. Here is a shot of that view. The sea, deeply refracted by the distance and the angle, appear in a tundral blue.

For the technically curious, these shots were taken with my new EOS 40D and the piddling 28-135mm f/3.5 Canon lens bundled thereto. They were shot in RAW and processed in Aperture. I think a more competent lens could fare a lot better in these situations; but the Canon line-up of lenses is so variegated that I am having trouble selecting the next one. So, for the moment, I’m going to be practicing the basics with the 28-135. I am still very new to optics and photography, possessing only scraps of knowledge from A.P. Physics in high school. First principles probably need to come before a $2,000 piece of glass.