To start off, a thank you for all of the comments recently (including the birthday wishes!).

I was away in California for the past two weeks, taking photographs around Lancaster (the poppy reserve), Atascadero (colourful fields of flowers), the Arboretum at UC Santa Cruz, Point Lobos and UC Berkeley Botanic Garden. It had been several months since I had a photography trip, due in most part to the work required to complete the John Davidson web site. Now that that is done, though, I'm expecting to make a number of trips for the remainder of this year.

Today's photograph is from the Shell Creek Road area of California, east of Atascadero along Highway 58. On either side of the creek for a few kilometres were fields of baby blue-eyes, goldfields, California poppies, tidy-tips and fiddlenecks. The areas weren't solid masses of colour as I had hoped, but impressive nonetheless.

I used a couple web sites to determine where I'd be visiting: Carol Leigh's Wildflower Hotsheet and, to a lesser extent, Desert USA Wildflowers (the latter is better if you are planning on visiting the desert areas, which I decided I was too late for). My self-appointed task now is to avoid these sites, though, because of the displays I feel I'm missing out on.