Though sun and fun and surf (and turf?) may be the core of the SoCal identity, even Pacific Beach gets a gray winter day.
Gray Day at Pacific Beach
Category: San Diego
Convention Crossing Crowd
After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
Passenger
A bright gold shirt is a great way to stand out against the black paint of this mid-1950s Buick.
Bubble City
The enormous interior halls of the San Diego Convention Center are far beyond the size necessary for most of the American Chemical Society presentations, so these pop-up tents divide the space in an excitingly futuristic way.
BNSF Paint Job?
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
Many Rails
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
But the Curtain Did Not Rise Again
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
Lunch on the Elevator of the USS Midway
From a past carrying aircraft to the flight deck of the USS Midway, this carrier elevator is now a lunch spot.
San Diego Cyberpunk
This view—past tall metal fences, over bright yellow industrial pipes and through palm trees, would fit well in the cyberpunk environs of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Having not been back for several years, I was as entranced as ever by the strange mishmash that constitutes SoCal.
San Diego Trolley
Sun? Palm trees? Ample public transit? This must be California.
A Double Look Back at La Jolla
Building from my “How Did I Miss These?” post from a few weeks ago, these images from La Jolla, California likewise escaped me years ago.
In this case, though, these images are a return to a return.
While I lived in La Jolla in 2007, these images of its beaches weren’t captured until I returned there in 2012.
This bright beach-going moment was also a chance to experiment with a new manifold of photoprocessing options.
Though I typically prefer high-contrast images, the soft sky and ocean hues just weren’t a natural fit for deep, dark shadows.
This is, to my memory, the first batch of photographs in which I’ve ever lowered the contrast significantly.
Lowering contrast while increasing the exposure led to these dreamlike images.
(Though a truck atop a narrow pier is perhaps a different kind of dreamlike.)
Lastly, we finish with a dramatic panorama of downtown San Diego. This one’s definitely worth clicking through to see at full size.
Two Spontaneous Alignments in San Diego
With so many tall, vertically oriented structures in a city, it’s probably no surprise that some of them should fall into pleasing alignment with one another. The modest glow of sunrise light through the gap between the clocktower and the adjacent building provides a friendly spark to guide the eye to the center of this image.
In this second case, it’s harsher Sun, rather than palm trees and clock towers, that has found its way into a special alignment through the streets of San Diego. Bright light falls into this canyon that should otherwise be dawn dim.
Muscle Cars at Dawn in San Diego
Dawn makes for this dynamic moment when parts of a scene are thrown into dramatic sunlight while others still benefit from delicate, scattered, indirect light.
I like these shots for how the Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger are bathed in relatively gentle, flattering light, but headlights and sunlight make the rest of the scene comparatively high-contrast.
A E S T H E T I C Rail
I’ve played with that 90’s vaporwave aesthetic in the past with aggressive color grading; on this particular San Diego dawn, those steps were hardly necessary. Palm trees and magenta hues do most of the hard work for themselves. I can hear the synths already…
Waiting for Work
This sequence of three images, captured over the course of a morning (dawn to rush hour), paints an oddly small-town-ish picture of citizens waiting for the San Diego Trolley.
Decaseconds 