The parenthetical in the subtitle is in honor of The Pip (age 10), who never fails to point out when the numbers 420 or 69 show up. He doesn’t entirely understand why either of those is amusing, but he’s a ten-year-old boy, so…
Anyway, it’s been a draining week, so I needed some morale-boosting activity, which meant that rather than writing new stuff yesterday, I spent the morning selecting and editing the best photos from the photo hike I took in San Francisco on our recent trip to California. Once again, I forgot to turn Strava on, so can’t give a time-and-distance, but it was basically two hours walking from our hotel to the Embarcadero, down under the Bay Bridge, and then back, taking pictures of stuff that struck me as interesting. I’ll post a selection of them here.
It was pretty much classic bay Area weather: in some directions, gorgeous clear blue skies:
In other directions, cloudy enough that it made most sense to change to greyscale, particularly when things were backlit.
This is the random Gandhi statue in the cafe area outside the port building, which I also shot from the other side:
The hand gesture here is probably supposed to suggest humility and peace, but I could also read it as “Nah, dude, this place is full of rich assholes, let’s go somewhere else.” Which amuses me…
I spent a good deal of the walk looking at merchant shipping, the scale of which is always a little mind-boggling:
The Embarcadero area is well set up for photographing classic city views:
And also has a lot of places where architects are doing weird shit just because they can:
As always, some of the very best pictures are the ones that accidentally have people in them:
I want this one to be better, but it took a shitload of tweaking in GIMP to get it to here, because the bridge tower way at the edge of the frame was distorted in a way that made it look like it bent in the middle.
It’s still slightly crooked, but way better than the raw image, and has basically maxed out the time I’m willing to spend on it.
I’m also kind of partial to this reverse angle of the statue shot from above:
A major temptation when I do these hikes in built-up areas is just to take endles pictures of weird buildings and ugly public art, which I try to resist. I can’t not post a photo of these creepy-ass statues on a rooftop in the downtown area, though:
There’s definitely a John Bellairs-type juvenile novel in which these turn out to be the legacy of some evil wizard, whose dark magic threatens to re-animate them and kill our wholesome protagonists. In the end, he’s thwarted by the inherent goodness of our characters, plus a few snippets of Church Latin and some random artifact. I’d totally read that.
There are a lot of tweaks to these that could still be made, and quite a few shots in the set that would’ve benefitted from having the aperture closed down more to give a greater depth of field. I may need to adjust the auto-focus on the camera, too, because in some places it seems a bit off. Here’s the whole set of processed pictures on Google Photos, if you want to see more. On the whole, though, I’m pretty happy with these, and it was a pleasant diversion during a week that sorely needed one.
Weather permitting, I may try to get out somewhere this weekend and get some new shots so I have material the next time I need a mood boost. It’s supposed to be stupid hot, though, so maybe not. Anyway, if you want to see that when it happens, here’s a button:
And if you want to critique my aesthetic choices, or know the name of the novel about those creepy-ass statues, the comments will be open: