This weeks PhotoFriday, “Nature,” is a much broader theme than we’ve had in the last few weeks. So lots of choices this time — too many — and in the end I figured that showing the vastness of a natural area, barely touched by man was the way to go. This image is originally from my tribute to Ansel Adams.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Lightness.” I’m entry number 220.

If I’d gone with my first instinct, this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Fear,” would have been incredibly easy. Many people fear snakes, but one person in particular has had a bad week and I didn’t want to make it any worse. Also, I’ve use that picture before (“Dangerous“).

Instead find the above picture of a woman in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba. She looks trapped, fearful. She may be very happy for all I know, but for the purposes of this challenge she is in fear.

I thought this image encompasses the concept of an “Urban Landscape” quite nicely. It shows much of downtown New York from the Empire State building and includes a bunch of graffiti at the bottom which is kind of “urban.”

Despite Californian voters failing to reject Prop 8, the graffiti in Los Angeles shows that not everyone agrees: Post No Bills Prop.

One thing that I wasn’t really expecting to see in Southern California were a series of wind farms. With their quiet grace and purpose against the desert backdrop they are oddly beautiful.

In the weakest possible sense of the word, these two images can be considered to be my tribute to Ansel Adams’ work in the Sierra Nevada.

While he had to lug huge cameras around and work with large format film I merely had to carry around my 50D¹ and play around in Photoshop Elements.

I find it a little odd that the thing that drew me to both of these pictures were the colours² yet there is still enough texture and shape to make them work in black and white.

It’s at times like these that I feel that I have been short-changed with my 50D. Both the model above and below it have a HD video feature and mine does not. I’m not one to let these little limitations get in my way though…

With apologies for the size, here are a bunch of images I took in Yosemite stitched together into a single animated GIF¹.

What can you say about Yosemite that hasn’t already been said? And what can you photograph that there aren’t already ten copies of on Flickr? (Don’t even get me started on some of those people that used film rather than CMOS sensors.)

Having said that, it didn’t stop me trying. There is no two ways about it: Yosemite is an absolutely stunning location. Everywhere you look there is more beautiful scenery, forests, water falls.

As if wandering around a conference centre before the start of the conference wasn’t enough, I also went to the south of the Bay Area to visit some of the major sights in Silicon Valley.

I started at the excellent Computer History Museum. I don’t doubt that most people would find this mind-numbingly dull but I thought that the large archive of “significant” computers was great. It would be easy to argue over the machines that were on display, the ones that were more significant or, well, less American¹.

We went for a longer-than-expected walk just north of San Francisco and stumbled across these mail boxes. I love that they’re so bright and cheerful. Maybe it takes the edge off receiving lots of junk mail and bills?