5 posts tagged “san francisco”
Believe it or not, it took us just over 11 months of living in the Bay Area to actually make it to the Gold Gate Bridge. It was indeed impressive, and I wasn't tempted at all to fling myself over the railing. Not even a little bit.
Funny story about this trip: a week or two earlier we had visited some friends in LA. We stopped in Santa Monica, where we lived in 1999, to check out the old stomping grounds. As we walked from the Third Street Promenade to Ocean Boulevard to admire the ocean, we noticed this biker couple that must've been in their 50s. They were very distinctive because they were clad in black and red leather from head to toe, and the guy had a mane of white, white hair.
So now we're at the Golden Gate Bridge and Tala goes, "Hey, it's those bikers from Santa Monica!" She actually went up and said hi and had her picture taken with them! And after we left the bridge area, about an hour later we saw them in some other part of San Francisco getting gas.
No, I haven't forgotten about sharing pictures from last year. Admittedly they are losing their significance as 2006 recedes, but I'm committed to finishing this "Year In Pictures" thing I started! Apparently we only took two photos worth keeping in June, and this was the better of them. This was taken on Mt. Diablo, about 20 miles east of Oakland. You can drive to the summit, and on the way up are lots of little campgrounds and trailheads. This area was a collection of cool cave and boulder formations carved out of the sandstone.
Okay, we're back on track in terms of the timeline, meaning this picture was actually taken in March. My folks had driven down from Seattle and we went out to Point Reyes, which is near the San Andreas fault.
Check out this map of the area.
The lighthouse is on the tip of that outcrop to the southwest. That straight line going up to the northeast is an amazing stretch of beach that is also one of the most treacherous in the state. In fact, up until a couple years ago it used to be illegal to even set foot in the water because sudden surges could easily suck you out and kill you. But that changed after surfers sued for the right to, I don't know, commit suicide by wave.
Back to the map, the long finger of water running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right? That's the San Andreas. And that curvy bay that faces south? That's believed to be where Sir Francis Drake first set foot on the continent of North America, although that account is disputed.
Not surprisingly, Point Reyes is incredibly windy, and it was really screaming on the day we visited. You have to descend a couple hundred stairs to reach the lighthouse, and I carried Harlan at some points because I was half worried the wind was going to blow him into the ocean. Which would have sucked. But we watched this sailboat come tooling along down that beach to the north, and as he went whipping by the lighthouse I managed to get a couple shots off.
Can you spot what is wrong with this picture? Probably not. What is wrong is that It was taken in January, not February. But we apparently didn't take any pictures in February, so I was forced to use one from another month to maintain Gregorian continuity.
There's nothing much to say about this one other than it is a building in downtown San Francisco and we just liked the play of sunlight, and the contrast provided by the shadow.
I am in possession of both a digital camera and a kid. That means I end up taking a lot of photographs. This year I've taken 1,412 photos, which is probably the smallest annual count since Harlan was born. That, however, does not count the multitudes of pictures Tala has snapped since she got her own digital camera in September. Our combined production is probably well over 2,000.
In order to bring some order to the digital shoebox that is my "My Pictures" folder, I try to go through each month and pick the handful of pictures that are the cream of the crop. At the end of the year we get these shots turned into hard copies and put them in an album. This year I have just 67 pictures -- fewer than 5 percent of the total -- that will make the leap from pixels to photo paper.
In an effort to have our pictures keep up with the Web 2.0 wave, I will share one photo from each month here over the next couple weeks. This one was taken in January on our first trip to Half Moon Bay. The sky was too bright to get good people shots but this one captured that rugged natural beauty this part of California is famous for.
