The Gate to the Bay

The Gate to the Bay, originally uploaded by Ivan Makarov.

Please see it LARGE.

This summer has been really frustrating to me in terms of new work. Every time I got our to shoot recently I encountered bad or boring weather on location and came home with no interesting shots whatsoever. At least this gives me a chance to go back through my archives, delete a lot of useless images, and perhaps find one or two to work on.

This was taken earlier in the spring when MumbleyJoe and I got out one evening to shoot on the beach nearby the Golden Gate Bridge. This gives you an idea of what San Francisco Coast mostly looks like - lots of rocks. In this image you're seeing a Western side of the bridge, entrance into the City, or a gateway into the Pacific Ocean.

To see my other images from the Pacific Coast of California, please click here.

Mpix Updates Their Website

I know I've said it before, but I am planning on posting more regularly once again. The summer (in other words, boring weather) is almost over, although it is 100F degrees outside right now. Hopefully this means I can start taking more pictures again.

Meanwhile, please make sure and pay a visit to my favorite online printing lab, Mpix.com. They've been my default printing lab whenever I wanted to make a superb quality print for quite a while now. I'm glad to report that they recently completely redone their web-site. I just put an order through them and it was much easier to do than before. I like the fact that now you can customize every print by changing options on it one by one, instead of only having an option to batch process it, as in the case of majority of photo labs out there. It comes out very handy when you need to print on different kinds of papers.

Again, this is a photo lab I recommend to all my friends and clients.

The American Sunset

The American Sunset, originally uploaded by Ivan Makarov.

Please see it LARGE.

This was taken on the same trip to Utah where I took the recent images posted on our family blog. We were done with the Lamb Day, and were finishing the day the American way, by sitting in a backyard eating BBQ with our family. I was too tired to get my camera out, tripod, filters, etc, but after few minutes of watching an amazing color show in the skies as sun was setting behind the mountains, I could no longer resist, and took this image as beautiful pink and red colors began to disappear. To keep details in the foreground, I used a 2-stop ND-grad filter on my lens.