San Francisco: Alcatraz

On our last full day in San Francisco before we headed down South for a friend's wedding, we decided to visit Alcatraz. I mentioned in this post that we had purchased our City Passes directly from the Alcatraz Cruises landing and had booked our trip for this day. If you want to do the same, be sure to book a few days in advance. We thought we might be able to get on an earlier tour, but they had no availabilities until 4 days later.

You take their boat out to the island and then they huddle you together to go over some ground rules and interesting tidbits about the island. That day, there happened an author who wrote a book about Alcatraz on the island, so we had to stand and listen to some historical things as well.

Once they tell you you're free to move about the island, you walk up this long, winding path to the top of the hill where the entrance to the main prison is located. Once inside, you get a headset that will guide you on your tour inside the prison.

There are signs along the way that have historical figures on them, like guys who attempted escape.

One of the last places you visit inside the prison, before heading outside is the kitchen. Apparently there were some stabbings that happened in there. Gee, why is that not hard to believe? Outside, we saw a fighter jet fly by.

After we finished with the tour, Adam and I went back around to the recreation yard. Adam felt he needed some exercise (snort). You can exit from the wall of the recreation yard down to the garden area. This is my favorite part of the whole place. It's beautifully kept and has so many gorgeous plants. Who knew Alcatraz was actually this lovely?

There are really great views of the bay from this area as well as lots of nesting birds.

Before we took the long road back down to the boat, Adam made a panorama on my iPhone. Like I said, really great views!

I definitely recommend visiting the Rock. I'm not guaranteeing you'll meet Nick Cage or Sean Connery though.

San Francisco: Fun Filled Day

I wanted to bring Adam to Golden Gate Park, because he had never had the pleasure of visiting any of the last trips that we took to San Fran. I feel like visiting the Golden Gate Park is a must do when you're in the city.

We started our day at the California Academy of Sciences. A nerd's paradise.

We headed straight for the Earthquake exhibit. They built a model home to replicate what it felt like to be in both the 1906 and the 1989 earthquakes. I've always been terrified of the thought of earthquakes. I remember when I was little and we had an earthquake at our house in New Jersey and it freaked me out. Then last year we had our fair share of natural disasters in the Northeast, including the Virginia earthquake, which somehow made it's way up here. Now granted, neither of those earthquakes were all that strong, so I was curious to know what a strong earthquake would feel like especially since at the time we were considering a move to Northern California. Yup, definitely how I expected. I'll take a nor'easter over an earthquake any day, thankyouverymuch.

After the earthquake, we headed over to check out the baby ostrich exhibit. According to the Academy, ostriches are connected to earthquakes. From what I understand it has to do with the movement of the plates, since their closest ancestors are located in South America. Anyway, the ostriches were wicked adorable.

We took the elevator upstairs to the living roof, which is beyond amazing. They have this super complicated system of drainage to keep plants native to the area growing on the roof. It's so gorgeous and so is the view. The building across from the Cal Academy of Sciences is the de Young Museum, which has a great view of the city from it's tower room.

We headed back downstairs to visit the rainforest. This was the only exhibit that was closed for refurbishment the last time I visited and it was probably the one thing I wanted to see the most. As you walk up the spiral path, you head into different parts of the canopy, which have different animals and plants. Once you reach the top, it's just amazing. There are birds and butterflies flying everywhere.

After we finished up at the Academy of Sciences, we walked over to the de Young museum, which was also included on our City Pass. Adam's not really an art museum kind of guy, but he let me walk around in a few exhibits. We mainly wanted to see the view from the top of the tower. You can really see a lot of San Francisco from up there.

The last place we visited before leaving Golden Gate Park was the Conservatory of Flowers. I really enjoyed my visit last year when they had a "Wicked Plants" exhibit that featured poisonous plants from all over the world. This year was a prehistoric plant exhibit complete with dinosaurs.

I love Golden Gate Park and wish we could have spent more time there visiting the waterfalls and the bison, but it was getting hot out and we were getting tired from all the walking. It's definitely a lot of walking. :)

Cleveland: Put-in-Bay

Last Fall my parents had the opportunity to visit Put-in-Bay, an island in Lake Erie, and since then my mom has been raving about it and told us that we'd definitely go there when we visited. I don't know why, but I never really thought there were islands large enough to live on in Lake Erie. Boy was I wrong.

It was a bit of a drive to get there from my parent's house. When we finally arrived we had just missed the ferry we were going to take, so we decided to take a drive to the Marblehead Lighthouse to kill some time. My grandpa decided to sit this trip out he wanted to relax at home. I guess we tired him out with all our travels that week.

It was a gorgeous day out and there were a number of picnic-ers at the park. Marblehead lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse on Lake Erie, being built in 1821. I'm not sure if you can go into the lighthouse, since it was closed when we were there, but some of the flyers in the windows made me believe that during the summer they do have tours.

Adam wandered down by the lake, apparently ignoring the signs that the rocks were slippery. I'm happy to report that he made it out OK. :)

From one side of the lighthouse, you could see the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, OH. I didn't realize how close we were to it!

We didn't stay long at the lighthouse, because we still had to get tickets for the ferry. We weren't sure how busy it was going to be that day, especially with all the school groups out and about, so we wanted to get over early to get tickets. It actually ended up being pretty dead at the Jet Express boat launch.

It's about a half-hour ferry ride to Put-in-Bay, it's not bad, the sights are pretty nice along the way. We even saw a home that was in the shape of a boat. At least we think it was just shaped like a boat. Not sure how a boat could get shipwrecked on land in Lake Erie? Those are some serious nautical lovers right there.

There's a small downtown with restaurants and shops right as you exit the boat. The feel of the island is actually a lot like going to an island in the Caribbean. There's even an outdoor bar that has sand floors and fake palm trees. It's kind of weird considering this island is in the middle of a lake that freezes over in the winter.

The funniest thing about the island is that golf carts are the preferred mode of transportation. You can even rent them down by the lake to be able to drive around the island yourself. It was almost like we were down in Florida or something.

We didn't end up renting a cart, since there were 5 of us and it wasn't all that tough to walk around to some of the places we wanted to go. Had my grandpa come with us that day, we definitely would have rented one. One of the places that we had planned on visiting was Heineman's Winery and the Crystal Cave.

Heineman's Winery was founded in 1888 and survived the prohibition era by selling tours through the Crystal Cave. The Crystal Cave is the world's largest geode and according to our tour guide, was found when the owners were digging a well. We decided to buy tickets to the wine tour and to the crystal cave. The wine tour was, um, interesting. It's a really small winery (like 3 rooms big) and our tour guide let us know that he generally didn't give tours. I'm pretty sure we got an abbreviated version of the real tour, because we couldn't have been in there more than 15 minutes (and about 10 of those minutes were him explaining all the different types of wine they make there). They give you a token that you can trade in for a small glass of wine of your choosing at the end.

We saved our wine tokens until after the Crystal Cave tour. Wine + long treacherous staircase + Kristin ≠ fun. So, after we finished with the winery tour, we headed for the Crystal Cave tour. The crystals are composed of strontium sulfate, which is a mineral used in the making of fireworks. They actually used to sell the crystals from the geode, so the geode used to be much more dense with crystals than it is now. We were really fortunate to be the only group in the cave at the time. Our tour guide for this was really cool; she let us wander around and take our time looking at the cave, since nobody else was down there and it was probably 20 degrees cooler than upstairs.

The geode was off to the right as you came down the stairs. It was big enough that my 6'2" dad could stand upright in it, which was kind of surprising. Had we been down there with others, we would have had to climb through the passage you see on the right in the photo below to exit. Now you know why I say we were fortunate to be down there alone.

The crystals had a pretty blue hue to them, which didn't really come out in the photos as it looked in person. I was glad I had brought my fisheye lens to use down there. It really shows how big the cave was and how many crystals there were.

After we were fully satisfied that we had seen enough of the cave, we headed back upstairs and had our wine sample. I tried one of their big sellers, the Pink Catawba and it was a little dry for my taste, I probably would have been better off getting a sweeter wine like my mom did. My mom really liked her sample and ended up buying some of the Sweet Belle.

On the way back to the ferry, we stopped for some ice cream at a small candy/ice cream shop called The Candy Bar and tried to book it back to the boat before the hoards of school groups that were being wrangled up.

Put-in-Bay is a neat little place to visit, I would bet that it's even better in the summer, when all the restaurants, wineries and stores are open and you could spend a weekend there seeing all the sights.

Family: Whiting Street Reservoir & Mt. Holyoke College

This past weekend I had the pleasure of photographing an awesome family for the second year in a row. Liz had contacted me last year to take photos of her daughter when she was just a few months old and I was excited when she asked if I could photograph her family again now that their little one just passed her first birthday! We started at the Whiting Street Reservoir and ended up at Mount Holyoke College. It was a ton of fun and their beautiful little girl totally hammed it up for the camera - so adorable. There were so many good shots, I had a tough time picking favorites for this post!

I'm in the process of creating a photography business website and hope to get it up and running soon so stay tuned!

A Little Birdie

I have a photo shoot today with a lovely family who I had the pleasure of photographing last year when their daughter was just a few months old.

Seriously, how cute are those cheeks! And those eyes. Gorgeous.

I love the tenderness of this mother-daughter shot, so sweet!

In preparation, I crafted this lens birdie. If there's one thing I've learned from previous experiences photographing little ones, it's that they need a reason to look at the camera. I'm hoping this guy does the trick! What's especially fun is that when you use the autofocus, the birdie does a little dance. Hehe.

It cost me very little to make, since I had the scrap denim from another sewing project. I just had to purchase some felt, elastic and puffy paint (~$4 total). I honestly can't even remember how I made it, so I'm not going to try to explain it here. If you're interested in making your own, I suggest looking at sewing instructions for making a hair scrunchie (be sure to measure the elastic to fit around your lens!) and then just get creative when you go to cut out some felt for wings, eyes, feet, and a nose. I stitched on all of the felt, but if you have a hot glue gun, that would work too! I used the puffy paint to make the dots in the center of the eyes. Et voila!

Now if the sun would come out today, that would be icing on the cake!

Butterfly in the Sky

On Saturday, Adam was busy working at home, so I decided to head up to Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory. It's only $12 admission for adults and worth every penny.

The place is actually quite large and has a restaurant attached. When you walk in, you're greeted by these giant butterfly kites that hang from the ceiling. The day I went, I had to purchase my ticket in the gift shop. The entrance to the conservatory was through a door in the gift shop as well.

Once inside, there are literally butterflies everywhere. It's amazing. They fly in front of your face, they land on you, they hitchhike around the place on your back. It's certainly not a place to visit if you're terrified of bugs. There were definitely a few kids screaming their lungs off. What can I say, it was a busy day.

The cool thing about the place is that there are so many different types of butterflies. There were tons of blue morphos (although, they never wanted to sit still enough to get a picture with their wings open, the owl eye butterfly below is one), zebra longwings, Cairns birdwing, glasswing butterfly, cracker butterfly, and the Malachite just to name a few.

There was also a ton of pupas transforming behind a glass case, waiting for their turn to become the next group to entertain guests, a koi pond with a small waterfall, and some adorable baby quails walking around.

I even got a self portrait in!

In addition to the butterflies and other animals I mentioned before, there were also a few lizards in cages, one of which can be seen below (if you can find it!).

The following shot was probably my favorite of the day. I loved that the butterfly's wings became bokeh. So pretty.

While I was walking around, this adorable little girl started talking to me and pointing out all the different butterflies to me, which was cute and helpful as I almost missed a few interesting ones! Thanks little girl for being so helpful! :)

At one point I happened to catch a butterfly using his proboscis to take some nectar from a flower. It was so cool to see this happen!

If you're visiting (or living in) Western Mass and you haven't been to Magic Wings, I totally recommend it. It's not a whole day kind of thing, but there's so much else to do out here you'll definitely find something else to take up the rest of the day! Plus your hand stamp is good for multiple trips during the same day so you can leave and come back if it's too busy or you need a change of scenery.