Ivy on the wall

Ivy on the wall.

Outside the Costa Mesa location of Surfas, a high-end kitchen-supply store.

Update Sep 27: Woo hoo! Logged into Flickr & discovered my photo of ivy on a wall was featured in Explore!

Update: Funny thing: I posted this photo to Instagram and meant for weeks to re-crop it and post it to Flickr. When I finally got around to it, I decided I shouldn’t redo it all, and just posted the same version. It ended up on Explore, and in a matter of days became my 8th-most-viewed-ever photo on Flickr!

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland cosplay…

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland cosplay out there, so here’s a feature post on my wife’s Alice costume from Comic-Con International.

She made the necklace and the vest, and beaded together two narrow belts to get the right look. Blouse, skirt, tights, belts and boots (plus material and beads) were obtained through shopping trips and online searches. Katie’s aunt helped adapt the pattern for the vest and do fitting. I helped with finding the pattern, sewing, transportation, and keeping our three-year-old son from melting down on those many shopping trips looking for just the right pieces.

Check out our SDCC 2014 photos to see pictures of her with other Wonderland characters, plus our usual collection of sightseeing and cosplay photos.

Comic-Con International – Collage

A sampling of photos my wife and I took at Comic-Con International in San Diego this weekend. The full set is at flickr.com/kelsonv #sdcc #sdcc2014 #comiccon #sandiego #cosplay #doctorwho #rescuerangers #hawkgirl #aliceinwonderland #onceuponatime #skyline

Photo taken at: San Diego Convention Center

A sampling of photos my wife and I took at Comic-Con International in San Diego this weekend. The full set is at flickr.com/kelsonv #sdcc #sdcc2014 #comiccon #sandiego #cosplay #doctorwho #rescuerangers #hawkgirl #aliceinwonderland #onceuponatime #skyline

Two night shots from after WonderCon

Two #night shots from after #WonderCon. The lower image is a #fountain outside the #Anaheim Convention Center. The upper is a corridor of the well maintained but nearly #empty Anaheim Garden Walk mall. The anchor restaurants at the front look like they’re doing fine, but behind them, the mall is barely occupied.

Two #night shots from after #WonderCon. The lower image is a #fountain outside the #Anaheim Convention Center. The upper is a corridor of the well maintained but nearly #empty Anaheim Garden Walk mall. The anchor restaurants at the front look like they’re doing fine, but behind them, the mall is barely occupied.

Eclipse Mosaic

Lunar #eclipse mosaic, starting around 11:00 and finishing around midnight Pacific time, just as totality set in. #moon #stargazing #notaphone

Lunar #eclipse mosaic, starting around 11:00 and finishing around midnight Pacific time, just as totality set in. #moon #stargazing #notaphone

–Instagram

Four views of the moon over the course of tonight’s lunar eclipse, starting around 11pm and running until about midnight. I actually got some shots at the second stage without the phone line in the way, but I liked the way this looked.

–Facebook

Expanded on K2R

Woodbridge Snow View 1

Woodbridge Snow View 1 on Flickr.

Today’s flashback from my archives for Flickr’s Twitter Tuesday theme: Lake.

Woodbridge Lake is an artificial lake in Irvine, California, surrounded by suburbs. On this occasion in 2008, the mountains in the distance were covered with snow – highly unusual since they’re all less than a mile high! Normally, the two highest peaks in this range, known collectively as Saddleback, get a light dusting once or twice each winter, but that year an unusual snowstorm covered the entire range.

Abandoned Railroad

Abandoned floppy disk on tracks

This week’s photo challenge is “abandoned” — kind of like this blog was for a few months. 😉

A few years back, I explored a disused spur of railroad tracks branching off of the main line into a light industrial area of town. In many places, the tracks had already been ripped out, leaving only gravel paths (and in some cases stepping stones, as seen below) between buildings that no longer needed freight access.

I found this floppy disk sitting on the track, and the combination of an obsolete data technology and what I thought of at the time as an obsolete transportation technology just struck me.

A path of stepping stones between two buildings.The funny thing is, trains in the form of light rail have made a resurgence in the last few years. Los Angeles’ Metro rail system, started in the 1990s, has expanded dramatically. I actually commuted myself along the Green Line at one point, and while normally that meant driving halfway there to pick up the end of the line, there were a few times I tried picking up a connecting (well, not quite connecting) train from Metrolink, at a station not far from this spot. In fact, the track in the first two photos has since been converted into a footpath connecting a shuttle stop to the commuter rail station.

TODO: Import to K2R, link forward and back to Obsolete (2009).
QUESTION: Import the original 2014 post (with suitable tag/link changes), or update the text and post it as new? Also connect to this Mastodon post (local archive copy)

Let There Be Light! (Weekly Photo Challenge)

In the Lamppost Forest

Urban Light at LACMA is a large square filled with over 200 lamp posts that the artist collected from various locations over several years, spaced wide enough to walk through comfortably. It’s like being in a forest of lamp posts — perfect for this week’s challenge.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t even planning on going there. We went to see the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum at the other end of the park. Oil has been seeping out of the ground for thousands of years, trapping animals and preserving their bones in an incredible collection of ice age fossils. But the parking lot on that side of the park was full, so we parked in the LACMA structure at the other end.

Eerie: Cave Ghosts, Moon and Fog

Halloween moon

On learning that this week’s photo challenge is “eerie,” I started thinking of all the photos in my library that might fit. My mind immediately went to this one, a shot of a nearly-full moon behind ragged clouds taken, appropriately enough, on Halloween last year.

Just about all of my “eerie” shots involve the moon, or clouds/fog, or both. For instance, this view of fog pouring over a hillside at sunset, and the shadows of the trees inside it.

Fog Shadows - Black and White

Or this one, a this scanned photo of a lunar eclipse from 1994. I’m fairly certain that the bright splotch is the moon, and the rest, including the ring and the sharper image at upper right, are lens artifacts. It’s been so long that I don’t remember any specifics of taking the photo.

Eclipse Ring

Finally I remembered a series of photos I took at the Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii, trying to use natural light (with only the cave walls to brace the camera) and picking up ghost images of the other tourists wandering through.

Thurston Lava Tube Ghost Images

I have some more shots of that cave over at K-Squared Ramblings. That’s also the blog where I’m trying to do NaBloPoMo this month. I started yesterday with a post about yesterday’s shooting at LAX and the spillover it had on the parts of town near the airport: roads closed, constant helicopter noise, sirens, and thousands of stranded travelers leaving the airport on foot, trudging over a mile dragging their luggage in a ragged line. You know, if I’d thought about it and found the right position for a photo, that would have made for a good “eerie” image.