So, I started taking my photos. Most were with my cellphone, not with my 4x5 camera nor with my 6x9 camera. I came packed with film and wanted to take at least two dozen large format film shots, but I took very few. I just found that the conditions were not right.
I started off finishing my Velvia 120 roll, then loaded my JCH Streepan 400 film and used my infrared R72 filter. I took a few shots, but mostly I walked around. The meadow is magical, it is the place that draws all our attention, the centerpiece, and if you walk around this meadow, you will feel you have had enough. I walked around, but then ventured into the other gardens.
You can walk deep into a coniferous zone, and there is a creek down there that was running dry, it had only a puddle of water here and there. The bridges, however, are also very beautiful.
There was the option of taking trails up into the higher grounds but I didn't do so, I wanted to go into the deeper locations because I wanted to find running water. I should have gone high because then, I might have seen a better view of the garden and meadow from the top, but that trail was also listed as strenuous.
I ventured into other areas, and took a photo here or there, but nothing like the bonanza I was hoping for. And the park is smaller than I thought, not like the other gardens in Los Angeles county I have seen which are truly massive. This one seemed somehow more intimate, even though that opening meadow seems to promise one wide, wide spaces, a place in which to find many adventures.
I know, I know, it is a shot of stagnant, algae-filled water, but it seemed very serene to me. No, I didn't see any fishes, tadpoles nor any turtles.
This bridge is beautiful, and will be more so in the coming weeks when the colors change.
There is some water here and there.
A few art installations in the garden
Paths and a variety of plants here and there. Yes, that is a house behind the trees.
There are houses in the hillsides. Of course they would encroach on the garden, real estate must be extremely desirable in this place.
More of the meadow
That bridge! That sunlight! Those colors! It will be magnificent when fall colors truly arrive here. They have arrived in other parts of the country, but of course, we live in a land of scorching temperatures that is heating up even more, so we will not see them for a few weeks yet. And even then, not with the abundance of other places, because we don't have those kinds of trees in abundance.
I should have walked up these stairs.
So, I was there for two and a half hours, from 1-3:30, and it was time to head to the mission to grab a few photos there then, maybe, see about getting some photos of the county courthouse. The thing is, the shadows were deepening by then, and I was tired, and all I wanted to do was get on the road. I didn't even go to the pier to try for some sunset shots, which I should have done, what was I thinking, but I just wanted to get on the road. So I did and was home by 8 p.m., after another grueling drive past places that sound inconceivably distant, like Calabasas, Thousand Oaks and Agoura Hills. Pure suburbia.
I took 2 photos with Velvia with my 4x5 camera, 2 photos of IR with my 4x5 camera, one roll of 120 with JCH Streetpan and the filter, and one roll of Velvia 120. Not a bonanza but I think it was enough.
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