Just as I pressed the shutter release, the wave took its revenge and separated the surfer from his board.

Running between the beach and the rest of town is a single track railway. I was expecting some kind of tourist railway, perhaps even a little steam railway (something like this one).

Instead, it turns out to be the Amtrak track between San Diego and the rest of the Pacific coast! Oh, and they don’t slow down as they pass through either.

While I see pelicans around the bay area regularly, it is rare to find them in a location where I can get good photos of them, at times when I have my camera with me. This one, taken on the rocks at La Jolla, just outside of San Diego, was in the middle of preening itself. They truly are magnificant birds.

On the way back from our Cancun trip last year we stopped in Houston for a few days. While there we took a day trip to Moody Gardens, down in Galveston. One of the attractions there is a ride on the Colonel Paddlewheel Boat; these birds were flying alongside the boat for most of the trip, enabling some close up shots of very graceful flight, like this one.

I’ve uploaded the first of the photos from last weekend’s trip to the San Diego area. We were staying in a hotel in Del Mar, and on one of our walks along the beach I managed to capture some surfers. All done hand-held with the 300mm lens, and even then too far out to be useful anywhere but on the web.

With some cropping though I think a few came out well. Check them out in my Flickr photostream.

Somebody asked me for the original file from one of the photos I took in Maui last year (one from Wailea Beach) the other day. While getting that from by archives I noticed that there were a lot more photos I hadn’t uploaded into Flickr.

To remedy that, I have uploaded a selection of photos from my trips to Cancun, Mexico and Maui last year. I will probably be uploading more over the next few days. Then I can get to the ones from San Diego last weekend and Golden Gate Park a few weeks back.

The iguana in the photo is from the Mayan ruins at Tulum, near Cancun, in Mexico.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I was on vacation for a week (in Orlando) and without any connection to the internet, not that I’d have had any time to use it even if it had been there. This week I have been catching up and getting ready for a two day meeting tomorrow and Friday. Busy, busy, busy.

This shot was actually taken at Huntington Beach in California – our trip to Orlando started with a brief visit to LA. I will get some Orlando photos up over the holiday weekend hopefully.