Bluewave Digital

After having gone to the fireworks display at pier 39 twice and regretting it, I've tended to avoid the overcrowded July 4th festivities. This year, however, I decided to go to the other side of the bay to enjoy the fireworks from a calmer environment. As fate would have it, however, the weather would not cooperate.

One of the interesting things about living next to ocean facing cliffs is seeing random hang gliders fly over every once in a while. On a previous photography expedition, I encountered a few further south, near Pacifica. However, these are not the ones I see on a regular basis, so I decided to find out where they come from. Amazingly enough, despite the fact that I have lived out here for quite a while, I've never gone out to Fort Funston where the gliders depart from.

I had some extra time this afternoon and someone from the office suggested I go outside, due to the weather being nice. I thought it was a splendid idea, but I didn't know where I should go. My girlfriend suggested Golden Gate park's Botanical Garden. Not having gone there in a while, I decided that would be a good place to relax and take some photos. Little did I know the place was overrun by small, furry rodents.

Well, it certainly has been a while since I've posted anything here. Let's recap what happened since my last post, shall we?

As anyone who has lived in or been around the San Francisco Bay Area can tell you, summer is full of lovely fog so thick, it's impossible to see more than five feet in front of you most mornings. However, it can make for some very fascinating photography.

The following were shot on Kodak MAX 400ISO film while I was scouting for possible locations to do some portrait photography in a few weeks. The Flickr photos are geotagged, but to give an idea of whereabouts I was wandering around, please refer to this map:

A year ago, or thereabouts, I was in a panic. I needed film for my intro to film production class, and I hadn't had time to go into the City to procure some. I ended up at a well known film supply shop, but they were all out of most stocks of 16mm. I had my heart set on black and white film, but all they had was Kodak Tri-X 400ISO film. I was going to be shooting outdoors on a bright, sunny day on a Bolex, so I was pretty heartbroken. I bought the stock anyway, because I needed something to shoot on the next day.

A long time ago in a completely different part of the state, I was given a decrepit, semi-functional Fuji SLR. I marveled at it's mechanical knobs and levers and wondered how something so wondrous could function without any motors or batteries. I learned how to master its gnarly lens that lacked any sort of automatic controls and leverage a flashbulb that could turn night into day.

It's been a long time coming. It was ugly, and each subsequent hack only made it uglier. The whole thing needed to be put out of it's misery.

I spent about a month sketching out ideas for what I could possibly do to my site to make it not look like I threw it together at the last minute. That process was getting me nowhere, so I decided to drop it and let the ideas just come to me.

One of the projects I've been working on for a while is a simple way to be able to publish podcasts online, without having to worry about downloading applications, or hand coding HTML or whatever. One of the main things that's been keeping me from finishing it, of course, has been lack of time. However, the other thing I noticed is that I was taking a completely wrong approach.

If all goes well, I will be graduating at the end of the spring 2009 semester. As it stands right now, I only have two more classes I need to take, so I am going to take the opportunity to drop to part time student status, and take on working full time.

What this means is that after all the time I've been here, I can actually stop killing myself with work on a weekly basis. Because my two remaining courses are history courses (Film History II and Latin America in the National Period), I won't have much to do outside of class time, barring a reading here and there. What I'm really excited about is that I finally get my weekends back. No longer will I have to do group projects, or work tirelessly editing or doing pre-production on films outside of class time. What does this mean, though? What will I do with all that free time?