Juan Bautista de Anza Park

I got introduced to Juan Bautista de Anza Park several years ago and was immediately struck by the mystique of the place with its towering oaks and seas of silvery grass rustling in the wind. It's difficult to imagine that a place like this exists in the middle of a Calabasas subdivision. In fact, the pictures I've taken are no more than five hundred feet, at any given point, from a playground.
On this particular afternoon, I felt the call to the park, as I'd long been wanting to capture the sun shining through the branches of those magnificent oak trees. With the days getting shorter, I figured I would be able to catch some great lighting early and be home at a very reasonable hour. The thing about sunset photography, though, is that, from the moment I set foot outside the car, it becomes a race against the clock to get as many possible pictures of the area while the light is still good. This involved me racing past the "BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES" sign and up a steep hill covered in four-foot high, dry grass with flecks of ash from fires past still encrusted on the stems, and snapping until my fingers ached.
While I love my camera, one of the things I'm finding frustrating is the inability to preview the pictures in bright light to see whether the shutter/F-stop/ISO settings are working or not. This makes experimentation incredibly difficult and has led to many disappointments on returning home. In any case, I didn't quite get the pictures I'd hoped for, but I think I surpassed some of my expectations. For instance, there was the innocent adolescent couple that stumbled into one of my shots, just as the lighting was perfect. At first, I was annoyed with their hormonal gropings, but then I realized that, backlit in the shadow of the oaks, they seemed the perfect examples of Adam and Eve in their garden. I started snapping, and I was pleased with the results. I suppose this should teach me a lesson in making lemonade from life's lemons...
In any case, despite being in the midst of human habitation, there is a mystical sense of isolation in this park. Something in the way the wind whispers through the grass, the way the oaks cast their long shadows across the hillsides, the way the white falcons screech to each other as they battle the black crows for perching space, makes this place magical. To sit in silence on a sun-shadowed swing, to fly out over the land, then back again to the roots... this is a fragment of paradise. Adam and Eve indeed.