Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Lakes - Some beautiful snow in the High Sierras

On December 27th, the family made our somewhat annual trip to Mammoth Lakes, CA for a little skiing and R&R. The drive from the San Francisco Bay Area could not have been any better. No snow until the very end of the 7 hour drive and no traffic at all. On top of that, we had some amazing scenery as we drove through the Sierras.

We had perfectly blue skies as we drove through the Lake Tahoe area. The trees were all covered with fresh snow from the previous night's storm and it was just beautiful. I had to stop to get some shots of this.

A sun flare shot (Photographer's note: To shoot a sun flare shot, have your aperture set for f16 and move yourself so that you see just a small amount of the sun peeking through the leaves.)

Mother Nature sure paints a pretty site!

Normally I would not shoot a landscape shot including a plowed road, but this was just too pretty (even with the road) not to photograph.

As we approached Mono Lake, we pulled over at the vista point and admired the great cloud formations over the snow covered valley.

We arrived at the Mammoth house at 3:30pm and after unpacking the truck, my wife saw this amazing sunset. I grabbed my Canon 1DX with the 24-105mm lens and grabbed some shots.After shooting the sunset shots, I walked back towards the house and saw the moon just starting to rise above the mountains and in between the trees.

I ran back to the house and quickly switched to the Canon 100-400mm lens and shot some moon rise photos. (Photographer's note: Normally I shoot my night shots with a tripod, but since I didn't have enough time to set everything up, I shot this handheld. I set the camera into manual mode at an aperture of f5.6 at 380mm. I chose an ISO setting of 500 and a shutter speed of 1/400 in order to avoid blowing out the moon, but also to give me a fast enough shutter speed to handhold the shot and not make it blurry.)

Well...it looks like this will be the last blog of 2012. Looking back my blog posts from this year, I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced so many amazing things. I have had a chance to travel all over the world and meet so many interesting people. I have also heard from so many of you, the blog readers, with great questions and feedback. I would like to thank all of you for being part of this ongoing journey through life! I hope that you all have a great New Years Eve and a positive and eventful 2013.