Category: Uncategorized

The San Francisco Bay Area is blessed with lots of natural and architectural wonders. If you love to shoot landscapes, you won’t run into a place with more variety. Yosemite is the best in providing the extremes of nature in relatively small and concentrated geographic location, but for a traveler or a local, the Bay Area is unsurpassed in its easy access to many breathtaking vantage points.

The moon between the trees at Lands End

The Lands End trail hike starting from Sutro Baths never fails to reward every visit. Along the trail you can find all sorts of birds from sea gulls to white-crowned sparrows. The trail alone is home to over 200 species of birds.

While hiking along this trail, you’ll see dramatic rock structures and the Golden Gate Bridge. Marvelous vistas make for great spots for setting up a tripod and shooting. Unfortunately, it can get windy and this can be an obstacle to getting any good telephoto shots. However, anything from 85mm to ultra wide is great.

Another great spot for landscape photography is across the water, north of San Francisco. Marin county is home to only one of 2 waterfalls that plunge into the Pacific. Also, it is home to many great spots for photographing the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline.

The weather along the coast of San Francisco is ever changing and dramatic. There’s fog, cloud cover, and not so often, sun. If you are going to be outside lots while doing landscape photography, the key is having layers of clothes to stay warm and not too hot, nor too cold.

Without an antagonist prowess fades away.

Prosperity unbruised cannot endure a single blow, but a man
who has been at constant feud with misfortune acquires a
skin calloused by suffering; he yields to no evil and even
if he stumbles carries the fight on upon his knee.

A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an
inferior; he knows that a victory devoid of danger is a
victory devoid of glory.

But the greater the torment, the greater the glory shall be.

Prosperity can come to the vulgar and to ordinary talents,
but to triumph over the disasters and terrors of mortal
life is the privilege of the great man.

No one can discover what he can do except by trying.

Disaster is virtue’s opportunity. Those whom an excess
of prosperity has rendered sluggish may justly be called
unfortunate.

All excesses are injurious, but immoderate prosperity is
the most dangerous of all.

By suffering misfortune the mind grows able to belittle suffering.

Your good fortune is not to need good fortune.

The life we receive is not short but we make it so.

Procrastination is the greatest waste of time.

Expectancy is the greatest impediment to living: in
anticipation of tomorrow it loses today.

The present is fleeting. . . it ceases to be before it has become.

The only people really at leisure are those who take
time for philosophy. They alone really live.

All virtues are fragile in the beginning and acquire
toughness and stability in time.

Less labor is needed when your concern is for the present.

For however unadvertised virtue may be, it is never wholly
unknown but gives signs of its presence, and the worthy will
track it down.

Nothing can equal the pleasure of faithful and congenial friendship.

It is important to withdraw into one’s self.

What is the happy life? Self-sufficiency and abiding tranquility.

The good lies not in the thing but in the quality of selection.

At around lunch time I grab my Canon T3i and the kit lens that it came with to do street photography.

I started a few weeks ago.

I’ve been inspired by Eric Kim and his blog to do this. If you haven’t checked out his videos using a GoPro to record how he does street photography, you got to check them out.

When I photographed something on the street (which isn’t street photography) in the past, it looked something like this:

Now I’ve changed what I’ve photographed a bit.

Most of the shots that would get likes on Instagram were landscape related, but something came over me. I talked to the owner of the coffee shop, Reverie, and asked him what’s changed in 10 years. He said all the middle class are gone (from Cole Valley). It made me think that I need to use photography to preserve what’s left of what I love about San Francisco so that people do not forget.

Even though my “street” photos don’t get as many likes like the one above, I feel it captures what San Francisco is like right now, workers have cell phones and the cars look a certain way.

Compositionally, It’s far from perfect, there’s a rhythm that’s lacking and it’s not very HCB, but out of the hundreds of shots I’ve taken, I think this is my first real street photograph.

The mobile application, Instagram, woke me up to photography. I feel the need to see light in different, novel arrangements and colors and to capture these.

What is a photograph?

So far my efforts have been mimetic. I see something pleasing and wonder how can I reproduce the same thing. The fog photo you see above is done in a style of a local photographer who does nothing but fog.

But an imitation is far from authentic; it is a play acting.

For a photograph to be authentic work of art it cannot be a substitution for a thing. Most momentos are like this. It cannot be mere representation. Yet what is placed on the film or CCD is mere representation. How is it more in the hands of an artist?

It seems that my life is out of whack now. I thought I’d be in SF but a few things happened. I fell for someone. I followed her back here. She does not want to talk to me.

Work is great. It’s challenging.

Am I living a truly engaging life? Am I authentically in the here and now? Or only following some script?

I hope to get this sorted out soon

Today I’ll enjoy reading “Being and Time.”

I really like LA. I like SF, too. Right now, I think the best move is to move back to SF. My close friends will know why.

I just moved to Venice on a sunny Thursday on July 15, 2010.

I am very aware this is shocking to some of you SF folks and readers of City of Quartz, which I have read.

This is the walk to my coffee shop:

I moved for very different reasons. It wasn’t for a woman or a job. I am making less money, 20% less than what I’d get doing an easier, lifer job at an ad agency or tech. Believe me, I got lots of offers to work at different start-ups.

I believe that LA is the new frontier. The opportunities in Los Angeles are boundless if you can figure out how to shape into a meaningful layout its amorphous contours.

Cycling: There’s a growing amount of “early adopters” who know that driving 50 miles a day is simply not sustainable, and who also believe that life spent in traffic is no way to live.

I believe that cycling takes care of the top 5 problems ailing this country:

• heart disease
• obesity
• pollution
• traffic
• alienation

LA is slowly getting turned on to that.

Mass Transit: I’m pretty amazed that there’s mass transit in LA. There’s still the stigma of it being for lower class use and being not safe.

I’m still busy listening to LA. Every city has a different and unique message. I’m trying to figure out what LA’s message is.

There was a cutesy message of LA being the place where someone breaks your heart and your heart break becomes a source of following your path in (500) Days of Summer. They showed a use of LA’s urban core that was too cutesy: recently graduated hipsters using the subway and parks free of your fine, boho chic clothing being a hobo magnet. However, it’s a very appealing and seductive use with a message full of hope.

Back to the memoir in a bit…

This month the small web shop I worked for finally got an office on Kearney and Sutter:

Although I would miss working so close to the Reverie Coffee Shop, working down town would proved to be immensely advantageous for my work and social life.

I met a woman this month that I fell hard for. Everything about our time together felt like what a healthy love should feel like. I almost moved to Boston for her because she said, “Please, move to Boston, please.” I lined up a few job interviews, got a ticket and found a place. She changed her mind for some reason, and I couldn’t believe she could be so cruel.

I met another person who would change my life not long after this cruel reversal. He said that if I followed his advice, I would never get hurt like that again. He was right, but in the wrong way.

This month I hung out at Sadie’s Flying Elephant, a lesbian bar in Potrero Hill. Michelle Tea invited me to hang out their and listen to LGBT poetry. I would wear a hoody, and hide out in the corner trying to be not any one gender at all.

One night a very femme woman in jeans and an light pink leather jacket runs into Sadie’s. She sits next to me and is shaking. The butch bartender with a buzz cut and a peculiar habit of clutching her jaw every few seconds asks, “What’ll it be?”

“Vodka soda, please,” she says in a French accent.

After she gets served her drink, a skinny man with facial hair and a bowl cut slams open the door. He has a burning cigarette in his hands and blows by some butch lesbians by pushing them aside.

“Listen here, cunt,” he says in a French accent, “you come back with me now.”

“No!”

“You come back or we are threw.”

One of the lesbians tells him to leave her alone and he says, “Fuck you, bitch.”

At that point events happened really quickly. He was one the floor saying something about his arm hurting and got thrown out of the bar.