Tag: Ventura

Spring at the Settling Ponds

There are some days where chaos is the daily menu and you just have to flow with it. I had an appointment in the morning so I could go to my painting class in the afternoon. Well, that appointment turned into a hurry-up-and-wait-for-a-phone-call situation. Solution? Watercolor!

This painting is loosely based on a photograph I took while out at the settling ponds in Ventura. In California, “Spring” happens after any rainstorm. The brown grasses green, trees bud, flowers bloom. It’s the nature of the beast. We had rain yesterday and have another big storm coming in next week. In the days before my visit to the settling ponds, we had a lot of rain, and the result is this lovely little bit of trees and grass. Hard to believe this is within walking distance to the beach!

Gentle Spring

I did a bit of post in LR on the photo, but it does catch the sense of Spring, I think.

Watercolor, Millford paper, 9×12.

Gentle Spring

Gentle Spring

While I am busy with lots of other things – sewing, painting, learning 3-deck Canasta – I am also trying to move back into photography and just getting out. As well, editing photos I have taken, and adding mood to them which matches my mood but perhaps not what the original photo looked like! I guess that is cheating per some, but for me it is artistic license.

Before the day begins and I have read my snippets of depressing news, coffee in hand, I am reviewing past photos and editing them. This photo is one I took while at the Settling Ponds earlier this month.

Taken with a Canon G7X, edited with LR and On1.

Support

At the end of the Ventura pier, the platform widens out and in the center is an opening. You can look down into the waters below, and see the supports reaching up.

Years ago – maybe 25 – when I lived just a short way from the pier, in the middle of a fierce storm, a friend and I walked out to the end of the pier. The wind was wild, waves were high, we got soaked, we were stupid, we nearly flew off in the wind. The next day it turns out the pier had been severely damaged where we stood. Closed for weeks and weeks, the supports beneath were reinforced and rebuilt.

And now you see them.