Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach

Amy and I went to Santa Monica pier and Venice beach today, and of course I took my new camera :) The pictures didn’t turn out as great as I had hoped, but I have 2 reasons for that. One is that I wasn’t taking pictures of anything really interesting and the other is that I’m not that good at taking pictures. I just don’t have that creative eye to make something plain and obvious into something more. I’m gonna work on that, but I’m not holding my breath – I think it’s either something you have or you don’t, and I obviously don’t!

Our plan was to just go to Venice Beach because we both had never been, but Lola (the Motorola, aka the GPS on my phone) led us to Santa Monica instead (which isn’t far from Venice), though I’m not sure why because I typed in “Venice Beach, Ca”. It all worked out because we ended up going to both. Here’s some of the pier:

Venice is about a mile and half south of Santa Monica pier, so we took the boardwalk (which btw has a separate place for bikers and pedestrians. Can someone please make that suggestion to the City of Newport Beach!? It was AWESOME). I didn’t really know what to expect – people kept telling me it wasn’t very nice and kinda ghetto. Well, they were right, but it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. It reminded me of the strip in Playa del Carmen (long sidewalk with vendors, swap meet style). Here’s some of Venice Beach:

It was a fun day, but a lot of unexpected walking. I’m all for walking, but not 3 miles in flip flops. I took a lot of pictures and I hope that the more I take and experience, the better I’ll get. I don’t want to be a professional or anything, I just want to be able to take good pictures. And btw, Amy’s not into taking pictures so we didn’t get any of us – if Debbie had gone we would have gone crazy (she’s camera happy like me).