[media:20110102144115847 width:0 height:0 border:1 align:right link:2 alt:0 linksrc:disp David Wilkins]Field Trip:  Union Station, Olvera Street & Walt Disney Concert Hall,  January 19, 2013

This field trip is a “walk and shoot” around many of the great Los Angeles locations. We will be leaving Lancaster at 6:30 am on the Metrolink, and Palmdale at 6:39 am.  It is only $10 on weekends. (http://www.metrolinktrains.com/howtoride/page/title/weekends)

This field trip is a great opportunity for the upcoming LPA and/or 2013 AV Fair competitions:

• Close up
• Abstract
• Night Photography
• Human Interest
• Vehicles
• Creative

Please sign up below if you'd like to attend.

The Merrimack Valley Camera Club is pleased to invite the Lancaster Photography Association to participate in the 33rd George W. Glennie Nature Salon photographic competition.  The salon is open to camera clubs and photographic associations worldwide.  Last year, almost 100 clubs submitted images for competition, including four countries (plus the United States).

This is a premier, international all-nature club competition of digital images known for its diversity of subjects which range from animals to botany to landscapes.  In the animal categories, birds and mammals are usually well represented, but each year about a third of the entries are invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians or marine & freshwater life.

Randsburg: a Living Ghost Town

This month’s field trip is to the living Ghost town of Ransburg about an hour and half from the AV. It is close and distant looking place. The month of December is very busy and this trip will not take your entire day. We will start the day at UPDATE (07:30 AM - 09:00 Carrow's Restaurant at 1650 West Avenue K, Lancaster) and we will leave at 9:00 to go to Ransburg.

Randsburg is a living ghost town. The old buildings that are maintained buildings give the town the authenticity of a real ghost town.

Please sign up below if you'd like to attend.

With David and Chris Wilkins

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is about 75 miles South of Albuquerque on the Rio Grande River and is winter home to tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese.  It is one of the top spots for nature photographers.  Chris and I are going to Bosque del Apache in February.  Last year, one of the docents said that the Sandhill Cranes are doing their mating dance at that time of year.  What makes shooting at Bosque del Apache so exciting is that you can get close to the birds. Where they land at night is where they will be the next morning.  Both the cranes and the geese spend the night in the shallow water of the ponds at Bosque del Apache.  The geese do a mass take off in the morning and a mass return at night.  They can also be seen feeding in the fields.  The Sandhill Cranes take off individually over a several hour period and return over a short period at sunset.  So there are multiple opportunities to shoot the cranes taking off or landing.  The ponds where the birds overnight are small so you can get quite close to the birds.  A moderate telephoto lens of 200mm will do just fine.

Please sign up below if you'd like to attend.

“Small World” is an instructional program designed to present many ideas on how to use your photography to show a more intimate view of the landscape, the plants and small critters found there.

Using the principles of design, we learn how to capture the uniqueness and essence of the flowers and plants. We learn how to capture the mood of the garden or plant with special techniques and we encourage you to find and work on capturing the images of the wonderful critters that live in our landscape/garden.

The end of the program emphasizes the many ways that a single subject can be photographed thus concluding that “One shot won’t tell it all”.

Join Noella for dinner at 4:30PM at the Greenhouse Café in the Target Center in Lancaster

Tradition continues… our ever popular holiday dinner and 4th annual holiday photo contest is here again! Join us at the AV Senior Center at 6:00pm on December 18.

Our evening consists of:

Dinner – With your donation of $5 per person, LPA volunteers are able to provide a ham dinner with scalloped potatoes, green beans, salad, rolls, and desert.

Holiday Photo Contest - Holiday/Winter theme -- 2 Divisions:  Novice/Amateur and Advanced/Master --  3 classes:  1)Portraits/Pets, 2)Creative, 3)Misc – No entry fee & limit 5 photos (LPA Members only) – Digital Only and entries due by 11:59pm December 11.  All entries will be projected throughout the evening. Enter online.

Donation/Fundraiser – We hope that you’ll donate items to our fundraiser for the Friends of the Center, where 100% of money collected will be donated to the FOTC, a non-profit 501c3 organization.

More information on how you can donate, help, etc… can be found in the November LPA Newsletter.

La Purisima Mission State Historic Park -Village Days, Saturday, November 3rd

11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. (park opens from 9:00am to 5:00pm) We will meet at the Gift Shop at 10:30.

La Purisima Mission State Historic Park is offering the Village Day, or the Tule Village comes to life as visitors experience the blending of traditional Chumash (Indian) and Colonial Spanish life ways. Demonstrators help visitors learn a variety of skills such as grinding acorns, basket weaving, building a tule house, making soapstone beads or tule dolls, and playing Chumash games.

This field trip is in Lompoc, from a driving standpoint it is 3.5 hours. You may want to leave early from the AV or spend the evening prior in Lompoc (Pea Soup Andersen’s, for example). You may want to make it a date weekend.

Please sign up if you'd like to attend this trip.

Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War - The Largest and Grandest Civil War Event in Southern California and the Largest Civil War Battle Reenactment West of the Mississippi!

http://www.civilwaralliance.com/CWA/Moorpark1.html

Breakfast

We will meet for breakfast at Lucky Roxy's Cafe at 405 West Palmdale Boulevard, Palmdale, CA 93551 (661) 267-6526 at 7:30am (leave at 8:30)‎, We can caravan from the Cafe to Moorpark. The drive is about 1.5 hours.

Cost

$15 at the door $13 online was last year. No info about parking cost so it could be free.

Please sign up if you'd like to attend.