Author Archive | Bill Heller

Santa Barbara photo of the week by Bill Heller, click to enlarge photo.

Cachuma Lake is a beautiful place to spend the day. Even more so at this time of day. The sun was able to peek under the clouds the last few moments before sunset and light up the mountains. – Bill Heller

Santa Barbara photo of the week by Bill Heller, click to enlarge.

Santa Barbara is always beautiful, to the point that some people think we don’t hardly have seasons here. But maybe you just have to look at them a little differently. Winter sunset season just ended, at the beginning of that was butterfly season, when the Monarchs come home to roost. We’re now entering fog season. Locals have lots of names for it, most commonly “June Gloom”, or before that “May Gray” but the fog is rarely solid and complete as those names make it sound. It’s beautiful and wispy, it dances beautifully as it rolls in and out. Sometimes it hugs the coast and the ocean where from inside it may seem grey. But get above or beside it like this and it’s an amazing soft blanket hugging the city.

-Bill Heller

Santa Barbara Virtual Reality Photo of the Week by Bill Heller.

It’s always a challenge to try to get a new angle on one of our local landmarks. Our beautiful city has been photographed so many times from just about every angle imaginable. But it’s still possible to get a creative take on it if you do a little exploring and have some patience. It doesn’t hurt to have a creative best friend location scouting for you while you cruise around the city on a beautiful evening.

Be sure to look around, it’s a large panorama and you can drag and zoom in.

-Bill Heller

Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller. (Click to enlarge photo)

Happy California Poppy Day! “The golden poppy (Eschscholzia) is the official State Flower. April 6 of each year is hereby designated California Poppy Day.”

This beauty was found in one of my favorite local nurseries, Terra Sol. There are a lot of beautiful poppies around this time of year, but the advantage of taking my camera to Terra Sol is they have them up on shelves which makes it a lot easier to get nice angles like this. Of course I have been known to lay down on the ground with my camera when necissary to get these beauties, but it’s nice to have a variety of subjects all in one place. – Bill Heller

Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller. (click to enlarge)

Our sunsets are spectacular in Santa Barbara during the fall and winter. This is one of my favorite spots, under a beautiful Cypress tree at Butterfly Beach in Montecito. The lights across the water are in downtown Santa Barbara. When the tide is low you can walk all the way along the beach from this spot to Stearns Wharf, but the tide was definitely not low this evening. – Bill Heller

Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller, click to enlarge.

Yesterday we took a nice walk at Shoreline Park in the evening. We decided the best use of our daylight savings hour was to spend it on the beach, or at least overlooking it. It was a bit of a hazy evening, but I think most of it was sea spray, and it made for an amazing sunset! – Bill Heller

Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller.

A bit of a different angle on the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Clock Tower.
-Bill Heller

Santa Barbara photo of the week by Bill Heller, click to enlarge.

Time for another local resident! I love all the birds that frequent our shores, but the Egrets have to be some of my favorites. This is a Snowy Egret, fishing at the beach at Shoreline Park. If you ever get the chance to watch them fish it’s definitely worth the patience to stay still and let them get comfortable with your presence. They like to slowly walk through the shallow water, reaching out with their free leg and large foot to agitate the water, trying to scare any tasty treats out of their hiding places. Their large feet, combined with the fact that they actually walk on their toes giving the impression that their knees bend backward (when in fact it’s their ankle) makes them look like they are reaching out with a hand just like a person would. This guy does not normally have an upright crest, but those beautiful wispy neck feathers were getting quite blown by the wind. So they have another human-like trait, they can have bad feather days!

-Bill Heller

Santa Barbara photo of the week by Bill Heller, click to enlarge.

Perched high above Santa Barbara gives a different perspective. The beautiful red tile roofs giving way to the amazing mountains and Pacific in the distance. In the foreground I was fortunate enough catch an event at Casa de la Guerra. the colored lights and people having a great time were the perfect foreground for this amazing view.

I have to thank my friends over at Buynak, Fauver, Archbald & Spray for giving me access to the perch for this wonderful view.

-Bill Heller

Santa Barbara photo of the week by Bill Heller.

Last evening I found myself in Santa Ynez Valley. My plan was to look for some interesting wildlife to try out a borrowed lens to get comfortable with it before a shoot this week. But having arrived a little late in the day to find a good spot I decided to go after a different shot. As things got dark I found a perch on a back road overlooking several vineyards. The stars were really something to see this far away from the city lights. The amazingly bright one is actually not a star at all, it’s Jupiter. The two large trails of light are planes, but in the upper right hand corner there is the small trail of a shooting star.  – Bill Heller