Hiking at Alamere Falls with Patrick

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I went hiking with Patrick this past weekend at Alamere Falls. The hiking was challenging, and we have the blisters, sun burn, mosquito bites and photographs to prove it.

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Nonetheless, it was rewarding, and enabled us to play with our photography gear. Heh.

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Walking along the coastline was breath taking. It just never gets old. I didn’t carry much gear with me—I just brought the 35mm f1.4 and my 55mm f3.5 macro.

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It was nice to reconnect with nature. While San Francisco is cool, it’s hard to get out of the city sometimes. There’s just something about being around nature that feels right.

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These are tiny little flowers growing from green clovers at the base of the tree.

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We accidentally passed the falls as we were hiking… but we managed to make the best of it.

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We passed by a couple of lakes, and the scenery never ceased to amaze us.

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Patrick just got a new camera—it’s one of the new Fuji mirrorless cameras. I had a chance to play with it a little, and it’s impressive. There’s so much technology compressed in a compact lightweight package. I’m actually kind of envious.

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This is a brenizer method photo. We were in a field, and we snapped some pictures of each other taking photos of the wildlife around us.

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Patrick made me a little nervous taking photos near the edge. He’s literally one step away from falling down to a very painful death.

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Here’s a photo of Patrick taking a picture of these little flowers on the side of the trail. I love the way this photo came out. There’s something about how this lens renders these kinds of plants. I got a similar affect with the wisteria flowers in my last blog post.

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I’m not sure what this flower was, but the bokeh looks awesome. This was shot with the 35mm.

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And this one was show with the 55mm 3.5 macro. They’re just gorgeous.

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And there were these little orange wide flowers scattered throughout the hike.

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And yeh, there was this little red one as well.

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We decided to turn around, and we finally found the trail to Alamere Falls. At this point, we were pretty exhausted, but we trekked on.

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When we finally got there, we realized that we would have to rock climb and descend down to see the falls. This was no small task. And of course, once again, Patrick was on the edge taking photos. I’m serious, the drop off that edge is no joke.

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When we got down, it was incredible. We were surrounded by waterfalls, mountains, precipices and ocean. I can’t describe how beautiful it was…

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I think Patrick was pretty tired at this point, but I believe he enjoyed the reward of getting some photos of this gorgeous waterfall.

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This photo was created from several photos stacked on top of each other, with a median filter. Days like this, I wish I had a nice ND filter so I could really make that waterfall look like glass.

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There was something magical about the cool breeze, combined with the waterfall and sunshine.

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Check out the cascading waterfalls.

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Anyway, it was a great hike. I hope that Patrick will be up for another one in the future. Perhaps next time we can do some astrophotography.

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