This image resulted from the process of demonstrating color filters to my coworker. Colors, with black and white? Of course! The rich, dark sky and bright foreground in this picture result from (digitally) applying a red filter. My favorite part of that now-visible foreground is the large Chevrolet pickup, shoehorned into a parking space on a narrow San Francisco street.
San Francisco street scenes featuring motorcycles parked provocatively outside bars and cafés have become a recent focus of mine. Blues and reds in bright Sunday sunshine are enticing.
Striking modern architecture next to industrialization-era brick and ironwork makes for a dramatic combination. It’s also the bedrock style of my favorite cities, including New York and San Francisco. In this particular image, the sport bike and the small group enjoying breakfast at front add the perfect hint of scale.
Berkeley’s seasons are a weird, fractured, microcrystalline version of their East Coast equivalents. There’s a nice congruence between the variable season a given tree might be experiencing and the variable model year any street-parked vehicle might be representing. Having autumn foliage gently localized around this classic (if oxidized) VW Microbus makes for a delightful combination.
“Teenage” is a category that remains linked to California, and there are few places where the California/teenager overlap occurs more than in an older-model car jammed full of your best friends on a sunny Saturday afternoon in downtown Berkeley. There are plans to be made! We have to pick up that guy from the BART! What about hitting Grizzly Peak? Time to drive!
Like any college town, Berkeley is beset with pizza joints. Almost all of them offer a delicious slice, but a lot of those slices are, well, not really pizza. Deep dish so thick and dense that knife and fork are mandatory? All-organic cheese detonation without sauce? Pizza bagel? All of these can be mouth-watering under the right conditions, but quintessential crispy-yet-foldable slice of (New-York-inspired) pizza is found at Arinell’s in downtown Berkeley. The venue matches the food.
