out of the city

Pictures while a passenger in the car. This night there was a lot of traffic for some reason. Took us almost an hour just to get out of town, in one of those weird later-at-night traffic jams that happen sometimes for seemingly no reason on a thursday.

I’ve definitely taken this first picture before; the astute among my readers may note that the car is pointed in the opposite direction, and, in fact, we weren’t leaving the city then, so this post title is a lie. “into and out of the city” just didn’t sound as good.

project san pablo at night

We’re finally caught up to the current year; this set of photos was taken January 9th, just after new years’. Mike wanted to get dinner, I wanted to go climbing, we split the difference and went for a walk up SAN PABLO (getting dinner along the way).

Still a work in progress. …

berkeley rose garden / stair walk

This was, I think, the day before Thanksgiving? Sophie’s mom and also Serena were in town, and we had an afternoon to kill. She’s been around here enough that all the regular tourist stuff was played out, so we did something more local-ish. The stair walks are from a book, Secret Stairs: East Bay. I believe it’s a series, even. Anyway, there are detailed instructions for how to find the trail for what amounts to an urban hike. This one starts and ends at the Berkeley Rose Garden.

As you might imagine, there are a lot of stairs, but it’s a reasonable balance of up and down, such that I didn’t feel too strained (he says, 6 months later). There were a couple really amazing, sweeping panoramic views of the bay. I’ve only put one here, just because when you’ve seen one spectacular sunset photo from roughly the same square mile of the hills, you’ve seen them all. The experience of coming around a corner and looking to your side to see it, that never gets old.

edit: added another sentence so the last graph doesn’t trail off

PROJECT SAN PABLO update (and a photo of Sophie)

Still working on this, despite the radio silence and despite the lack of coherent narrative. There’s something about it that won’t let me go. I just keep shooting, hoping to find something. A lot of times, I’ll work this way for months and months (I think this project is nearing the year mark).

It just occured to me, looking at these photos, that I could do a series just on the liquor stores on this street, and have something interesting. Hmm.

I know, the Albany Cinema isn’t on San Pablo, but the picture was taken from SP, so I’m calling it canon. For now.