A weird spate of “Bay Area weather”—cloudy and rainy in the morning, bright and sunny in the afternoon, chilly but not cold—has brought moments like these, picnicking on the grounds of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, back to my mind.
HDR Photography
Fullersburg Woods was the location where I captured some of my earliest Decaseconds posts (all the way back to December 27, 2011!); it was a delight to revisit the location after the nature preserve has been completely restored to the oak savanna ecosystem it originally exhibited.
The Bombay Beach Ruins is a sculpture garden on the shallow shores of the Salton Sea, and this particular swing is the site of some of my favorite pictures—but the gradual evaporation of the sea has stranded a symbol of whimsy and magic on the beach as, well, just a regular swing now.
Boaters can’t swim across the lake (without checking with a guard first) and boaters can’t enter the swimming area, but they interact across a thin membrane of ropes and floats. Look at that log, moored perpendicular to the floating platform on the right; it splits the difference between the boat/swim categories.
This kind of image—period vehicles, strange race-prepped Miatas, everyday clothing, a pleasing landscape setting—is the sort that I anticipate I’ll be most interested to return to in 50 years. Capturing the experience of the end of the day at MiataCon crisply, telling the most about the space and the moment.
In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.