Baja on show
Spiny-Tailed Iguana (Ctenosaura hemilopha conspicuosa) eating Cardon Cactus (Pachycereus pringlei) blossoms. Photo: Ralph Lee Hopkins. All rights reserved. Click here to be taken to the San Diego Natural History Museum
THE WORK OF National Geographic photographer Ralph Lee Hopkins is included in the new show “Baja California” at the Ordover Gallery of the San Diego Natural History Museum. Also on view will be photographs by Octavio Aburto, Pilar Artola, Miguel Angel de la Cueva, Jack Dykinga, Patricio Robles Gil, Flip Nicklin, Abe Ordover, and Julio Rodriguez Ramos. All artwork in The Ordover Gallery is for sale. A substantial portion of proceeds will benefit the museum. For more information, go to: www.ordovergallery.com.
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Arachnophiles, rejoice
EVERY fall, the Butterfly Pavilion of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County metamorphoses into the Spider Pavilion. It happened this Sunday. Arachnophiles, rejoice. The Spider Pavilion is officially open. For details, click here. For help identifying the authors of the autumn webs now in most eaves and trees, click here.
This post has been updated. The headline has been changed to reflect this spider lover’s glee.…
Western eye
"Storm over the Green River" taken in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Photograph: Robert Turner. Image courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.
ONE of the first things that people ask photographer Robert Turner on seeing “Storm over the Green River” is if it’s a painting or if it’s been photo-shopped to look like a painting.
“It’s absolutely a straight photograph,” he laughs. “I think there are several reasons it looks like a classic 19th century Thomas Moran landscape,” he says. “It was taken just before sunset during a storm. That clouding effect in the background is caused by rain. And it’s a five-second exposure, so it has a gauzy look to it.”
The composition also has much to do with the painterly quality, he thinks. “It has a very strong diagonal and a sort of implied diagonal going the other way, so it leads your eye way, way back in …
Watershed weekend
ACCORDING to the California Coastal Commission, last year more than 70,000 volunteers collected more than 1.6 million pounds of trash from beaches, lakes and waterways on Coastal Clean-up Day. They hope to best that this year on September 19th.
To volunteer or find future events, click here.
Or click here for a listing of Los Angeles-area watershed organizations from the Santa Monica Bay Foundation.
For Friends of the Los Angeles River, click here.
To find out about inland river clean-ups from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, click here.
Or click here to be taken to a Watershed Wise Magazine tribute to Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green.
Finally, if you missed it, click here for Ilsa Setziol’s account of her day on the bay in search of blue whales. She didn’t find one. She found two.
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Western datebook
THERE are two weeks left to see Downstream: Colorado River Photographs of Karen Halverson at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanic Gardens (left) and only one week left to catch “H2O,” an exhibit on water by four photographers at the G2 Gallery in Venice. Pictured below is a sample from Ron LeValley.
Or for freshly stuffed listings of Dry Garden Events around the Southland, click here.
Then again, with fall migratory season in full swing, there is no better time to set up a bird-bath, as proposed by this bird-watcher in this week’s The Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.…
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