Uvas Canyon

We visited Uvas Canyon State Park near Morgan Hill last Sunday with the Cousins. Was in two minds to go on Sunday as there was an early flight to catch on Monday morning, but went anyways.

We walked around for 5+ hours through the park and covered multiple waterfalls and walked along creeks. It was a very pleasant day and we thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon enjoying nature.

This was my first trip with the Canon 5D Mark II with the L series lens and most importantly the Manfrotto tripod.

The pictures have improved by leaps and bounds compared to the old broken tripod and the 400D + sigma lens combination. Not that those were bad photographs but yours truly has learned a lot of tricks since that trip two years ago..

Here are a few pictures.. (the second and fourth Images are HDR composites of 5 images taken at -2.0, -1.0, 0, +1 and +2 Exposures respectively and then tone adjusted in Photoshop)

Seriously thinking of getting a photo site..

Any suggestions?

Truth be told

The little one has been given a project for first grade. It is to make a Diorama of one of the "Frog and Toad" stories.

When I got back from Austin Thursday night , the first thing she told me was "Finally, I also have a project!"

What that translated to is "Daddy, you have a project for me!"

After hearing her go on and on about this I asked Jr. "Didn't we do the exact same project three years ago when you were in first grade?! Remember buying silly putty in different colors and making frog and toad and you made a table, bed etc. with it and painted the whole shoe box"

Jr. says "yes and it is probably still in the garage!"

In a fit of laziness blurted out "why can't we just reuse that diorama?" and left it at that.

Friday evening comes and the little one tells me "I asked my teacher today if I can bring the same diorama my sister did three years ago and guess what?"

He said "NO!"

That was embarrassing.. Now I have to go face her teacher who probably is appalled by my "reuse" concept!

Daddy Narayanan is growing too old for Dioramas and is kind of getting bored of going through same projects with a 3 year deja vu cycle.

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A trip to Sausalito

Last weekend we decided to drive to Sausalito, thanks to NPR. Apparently the storm had moved over the bay area and it was supposed to be an extremely good visibility day to see the golden gate bridge and also the road down to Sausalito was going to be kept open over the weekend.

So off we drove and had a great time. Got to take some pictures of the bridge, then the kids spent two hours at the Kids discovery museum and we ended up driving around the cute downtown in Sausalito and had some great food at a Nepalese restaurant called "Taste of the Himalayas"

It was an afternoon well spent with something for everyone in the family!

A few photographs from the trip.

Separate posts on the museum trip and tiffin experience later...

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