Along the edge of the Embarcadero walkway are these plumbing fixtures… I can only assume that they are an essential part of the bay’s plumbing 🙂

Another shot from my morning at Crissy Field a few weeks back. This time though it is not the bridge or the Palace of Fine Arts; instead it is a plant. I don’t know what it is exactly. There were a number of them growing in the sandy area along the edge of the restored marsh land region.

Late one afternoon, after a light rain shower, I ventured out to the parking lot/car wash area here at my apartment complex and captured some shots of the various rose flowers around the edges of it. The colour of this one attracted my attention more than any of the others as I had never seen anything quite like it before. While the others were conventional reds, pinks and whites, this was more of a pale purple colour.

This was taken during a recent visit to Angel Island. While the weather was great for a picnic and hiking, the summer haze ruined any chance of bridge or cityscape photos. The haze has no effect on shots like this one though. The trails were still very green following the late spring showers we’d had in the few days before the trip, and there were plenty of these prickly plants waiting to attack the unwary hiker in shorts (most of us!).

At California and Market in San Francisco is one end of a cable car line. Less popular with tourists than the Powell Street to Fisherman’s Wharf line, you can usually hop on this one without any wait.

Read more about the history of the cable cars, check the current routes or check out the photos of the barn.

Another black and white shot; this time of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, taken on a busy Sunday afternoon: it was a game day, and the SF Giants were playing the Oakland A’s at SBC Park. This shot has none of that though. Even the bay looks quiet, although a fire boat, a large military ship with an entourage of tug boats and numerous yachts passed through this area while I was there.

I also liked the remains of a pier being in the foreground. My best guess is that they are from the old pier 14 – the new pier 14, a little closer to the ferry building. They seem to add something to this shot that seemed to be missing from most of the other shots of the bay bridge I took. It also seems to work better in black & white (I might post the colour version later in the week).

Taken last Saturday as part of my walk around the Crissy Field area, this is part of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Originally built in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the buildings, rebuilt in the 1960s, now form a quiet park area and are surrounded by some of the nicest homes in the city (at least in my opinion). It is also home to the Exploratorium. You can read more about its history on their website (be sure to follow the Next links to get the full story).

Was going to make this a pure black and white shot too, but couldn’t get it to look right so instead I blended in a little of the red channel (and then reduced it again over the sandy area in the foreground to avoid that becoming too colourised). The colour version is in the San Francisco gallery.

While up at Crissy Field last weekend I also saw a GoCar. Unlike other vehicles of this type, the GoCars are equipped with GPS and a computerised tour guide. This was was dashing around the Fort Point area.

Inspired a little by Dave Beckerman’s photo blog, I am presenting a black & white shot of the Golden Gate bridge. The shot was originally taken in colour, and then using the magic of Photoshop converted to a black & white (using the technique described in Russell Brown’s The Photoshop Show (a free copy of which was included with the Photoshop CS package I bought a while back).