Riverside

Today we celebrated friend in CHARGE, Mason's homecoming from hospital which happened back in the late winter this year. About 90 minutes outside LA, Riverside is a charming and historic town and it was lovely to meet the family, great hosts, for the first time and have the boys climb high on their huge pirate ship built by Dad and a pregnant mum at the time in their garden.

Reuben's former nurse Jenn accompanied us for the day out and was sat squeezed between the carseats. (PS She's actually stopped over for the night so we'll have the morning together too).

I hadn't bargained for the weather being 20F hotter inland, an area which a century ago would have been a hot desert oasis, the striking backdrop of mountains surrounding it. I was overwhelmed with how stiffling it was and how the LA beaches with their Mediterranean microclimate of ocean breezes and clear blue skies feel almost like another country. I'm trying hard to imagine how people coped during the days of its early settlement living in their Queen Anne or Craftsmen homes without air conditioning. Today it's knocking 100F.

A friend of their family's is a fellow photographer and Becki and I arranged last night to do a quick shoot for shoot after the party. I can't say it was an easy experience: Callum was running high on sugar and heat and thus refused to be in any of the images.
More... couldn't decide on Blip really, but my head still feels like it's in a pot of boiling desert water and I must sleep.

I figured it rather rare to get a nice shot of me, so that stuck today. But it may be gone tomorrow when I've done some editing. The traded disks beforehand leaving each of us to edit our own images of ourselves, an idea which worked well. So I can't claim credit here for the image, only the processing, so I hope I'm not entirely bending Blip rules. It's an interesting challenge when you shoot for shoot: do you take home the disk of your work or of the other photographer's work of yourself! Which do you want to see first? Over to you! We opted for the latter.

PS: Momentum shot from yesterday posted late if you're interested.