Do you have a least favorite season? Mine is winter.

Contrary to popular belief, the sun is not always shining in California. Especially in the Central California Valley in winter.

a typical foggy California winter morning

We have quite a few foggy days here, and sometimes a week can go by without us seeing blue skies and sunshine.

Because I love getting a healthy dose of natural vitamin D (aka. sunshine!) on a regular basis, I knew, after a week of hardly seeing any sunshine, I needed to find some, somewhere!

So last weekend, my gracious husband decided to put some projects on hold and treat me to a day out on the California coast. We decided to try to find a deli (we found an amazing one!), pick up some sandwiches for lunch, and head over to 17 Mile Drive along the Pacific coastline.

It was an incredibly gorgeous day!

the lone cypress tree along 17 mile drive

Once we finished driving (and stopping at many spots!) along 17 Mile Drive, we headed down to Point Lobos to do a little walking around before dinner.

It truly amazes me how many beautiful spots there are in California!

Where do you like to go for day trips in your area?

One of my goals this year was to 'improve my photography by working through books and tutorials'. Of course when I wrote that goal, I fully intended to be working with my Nikon D3100 camera. But life gets busy and I have not put in the time I was hoping to when I initially wrote that goal.

What I did discover recently though was an iPhone photography course by David Molnar which has really changed the way I think about photography and editing. When I first starting shooting pictures with a digital camera, I was all about trying to shoot the best picture I could without having to do any editing. However, what David teaches in his course is that you edit to recreate the feeling you felt when you took the picture. So sometimes that means a bit of tweaking.

Let me show you a couple of examples:

Here is a before photo of cream puffs...

...and here is the after. Which ones would you rather eat?

Before photo I had to stop and take on our way home from my daughter's class. Not really anything wrong, but...

...I love the way the quick edit transform the basic photo into something much more beautiful!

So you may be asking what apps I am using on my iPhone to take and create these photographs. Right now, I have an iPhone 4s and I must say I am really happy that when we got these phones about a year and a half ago, I went with the 4s over just the 4. Most of the time, I use the native camera that comes with the iPhone, but in some cases, I do use Camera+. The Camera+ app gives you more control over your settings than the native camera on the iPhone. And they have even just added a macro setting in their latest update which I am hoping to experiment with more soon.

For editing, Snapseed is my go to app. For one, it is a free app! And there is so much you can do in this one app to recreate what you saw when you took that photo. Even just minor adjustments to the brightness, contrast, saturation, and ambiance of a photo can turn your blah photo into something you want to share with friends.

Speaking of sharing, my favorite place to share my photos has got to be Instagram. As a photographer, I love to see the bits and pieces that my friends share, as well as having a place to quickly share something about my day. Whether it be books that I am reading, some project that I am working on, and the glimpses I see on the day trips we are able to take.

Even though I still love to use my Nikon D3100, I sure do love the convenience of using my iPhone for my daily photography habit.