Warm Happy Afternoony

Some of you will know that it is Winter in San Francisco right now. Heavy cloud layer, windy, cold, any time of day it is dismal. Like today. Yesterday however, was an amazing, warm, cloudless, beautiful day - I was overjoyed! Just in time for a maternity shoot, out at Baker Beach. Our backup plan for a cloudy day had been Conservatory of Flowers - at the very least, we'd have colorful blooms to brighten things.

There's a forest that lines the edge of Baker Beach. Much of it is dry and covered in yellow weeds and ankle-twisting pine cones, but towards a small ravine the ivy vines grow lushly up tree trunks. I gasped. A shaft of late afternoon light fell on a clearing and yelled: Take A Photo HERE.

I'd been looking forward to experimenting with some of these pics for a day now, so I set it as a reward for getting a set of standard baby edits done first. The little pic is pretty much the original with minor tweaks. I decided on a square crop because those dark, ivy-in-shadow areas were rather heavy and distracting. When taking the photo, I'd angled so as to bring the frame of unfocused foreground sun-lit weeds as high as I could to integrate those dark parts, but the weeds weren't high enough. Oh well. I could lighten them or crop. Right now I like squares, so there you go. I threw a glowy orange/pink texture over the square, so it feels very warm happy afternoony.