I just rediscovered a photo I took a few years ago in Huntington Beach, California.

PG will exercise a grandparent’s privilege and include a couple of photos of his offspring.

For the first photo, he asked Natey to look really scary. Natey has a hard time transmuting himself from cute to scary.

Astrid is usually a fast-moving extrovert. PG had to be quick to catch her in a pensive moment before she noticed what he was doing put on a big smile for the camera.

PG has not been a paradigm of posting lately.

His reason (and he thinks it’s a good one) is that he’s been visiting some of his  offspring.

Following is Offspring Exhibit A:

PG enjoyed the lovely cinematography of yesterday’s preview of The Guardians.

He decided to play around with some of the photographs of early French photographer, Eugène Atget.

Atget created the original photo upon which the following image is based. The photo was made at court on Rue de Valence in Paris where an early motorcycle and automobile mechanic appears to have set up shop.

You can click on the photo to see a larger version that includes additional PG tweaks.

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Here’s the original:

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Via Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1956

This is a photo PG took of what he thinks is one of the Juniper species that grow in the desert near Moab, Utah. He’s post-processed it for a little more intensity because nothing survives in this climate without an intense desire to do so.

While the twisted trunk and branches are typical, to PG, this tree looked like it had experienced a particularly hard life.

He understands that trees like this can shut down parts of themselves during long periods of extreme drought, then, after some rain, revive their seemingly-dead branches and sprout leaves. If you look in the upper right corner of the photograph, you can see some of the limited greenery of this particular tree which otherwise looks pretty dead.

Despite such harsh conditions, some desert trees native to the Southwest live to be more than a thousand years old.

PG tried to keep as much detail as possible in the embedded photo below (you can click on the upper right corner for a little larger view). If you would like to see a significantly bigger photo, clicking here will take you to one on Google Photo.

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Download (TIFF, Unknown)

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Born Isabella Baumfree to a family of slaves in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth sits for one of the war’s most iconic portraits in an anonymous photographer’s studio, likely in Detroit. The sixty-seven-year-old abolitionist, who never learned to read or write, pauses from her knitting and looks pensively at the camera. She was not only an antislavery activist and colleague of Frederick Douglass but also a memoirist and committed feminist, who shows herself engaged in the dignity of women’s work. More than most sitters, Sojourner Truth is both the actor in the picture’s drama and its author, and she used the card mount to promote and raise money for her many causes: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.

Link to the rest at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

After a heavy philosophical discussion of fonts, PG needed to lighten the mood.

As PG mentioned during the Thanksgiving season, he and Mrs. PG took a little vacation and stayed in an old farmhouse surrounded by orange groves with a view of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Here are a couple of tweaked photos from that trip. The bicycle was leaning against the farmhouse and the little angle was in the side yard.

Mrs. PG and PG spent a few days with their daughter and her family in the Central Valley of California. For those unfamiliar with the Central Valley, it lies between some coastal mountain ranges on the west and the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the east. The valley is 40-60 miles wide from east to west and about 450 miles long from north to south and has a hot Mediterranean climate.

The Central Valley is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world and provides more than half of the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States. More than 230 crops are grown there, including oranges, olives, peaches, pomegranates, figs, kiwifruit, lemons, strawberries, tomatoes, almonds, grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus. The Valley also grows a wide variety of Asian vegetables, primarily for export markets.

The PG’s stayed in a lovely b&b during the visit. It is an old farm house, built in the late 1800’s and owned by the same family every since. Large groves of Valencia orange trees surround the farm buildings, houses and b&b.

The owners have included a lot of lovely touches inside and outside of the old farmhouse. Photos of a few follow:

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