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Tweets du jour on 2012-05-11
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Across the street
A scene in New Orleans’ French Quarter:
I took this out of a conference room window in a hotel I stayed at a few weeks back — and thought this was a fun composition, even though (maybe particularly because) it’s got a little secret.
That nice-looking wall in the background? It’s not a fancy hotel or luxurious home — it’s actually a well-disguised parking garage. Makes a nice background, though…
Past that rocky shore
Taken from Muir Beach toward the southeast — a bit of San Francisco’s in there somewhere…
On our “spring break” trip to the bay area, we wound up having gray and rainy weather most of our stay (surprise!). So photographically, there was little to do but make the best of the situation.
Since we had time to linger a bit at Muir Beach, it managed to put my Blue & Gold polarizer to use in this shot — helps give things a suitably noir feel.
The fungus among us…
Seen on a walk in California’s Muir Woods:
OK, so fungus likely isn’t what most folks look for in nature photographs — but I thought this line of them with their distinct colors made for an interesting composition.
Ready to bloom
A bit of spring color for you from the Filoli Gardens south of San Francisco:
No great scene of social importance, just a wonderful selection of complementary colors by the gardens’ designers…
Landmark
It’s tough coming up with a “different” way of photographing a landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge. Making life more challenging for me was the fact that on our recent trip to the bay area, it was overcast and wet most of the time.
But as luck would have it, we were headed north from San Francisco during one brief window of time in which we had actual blue skies and sunshine. I’d found some roads on the north end of the bridge via Google Earth, so wound up at an old artillery site called “Battery Spencer” in the Marin headlands. It was windy as can be, but I managed to hold my gear still for long enough to get off a few good shots like this one.
There are other spots further west along the road that will give you good views of the bridge, but Battery Spencer is the best one I could find to capture both the bridge and the city in one frame.
Crystaline
As the saying goes, if you’re looking for a photographic subject, and don’t see anything in your surroundings — look up / look down!
This is a shot of a chandelier in a ballroom at Filoli Gardens south of San Francisco. I didn’t *quite* get things centered (I was in a crowd, so couldn’t do my usual stunt of laying on the floor for this shot), but I still like the symmetry…
I wood like to remember something…
I stumbled across this in a shop at San Francisco’s Ferry Building:
OK, the string is actually on a price tag — I just thought that from this angle, it looked as through the wooden hand had tied it on as a reminder of something.
Just waiting for breakfast to arrive
I spotted this little scene up in a tree at the Green Gulch Farm, near San Francisco, California:
The spider didn’t seem to mind the soggy weather a bit. Should you find yourself in the San Francisco area (in particular, in Marin county), we’d highly recommend a stop at Green Gulch Farm. The people there are friendly, and it’s a wonderful quiet place for a stroll (even on a wet day)…
Calakmul Structure III
Structure III isn’t the largest building at Calakmul, and it was likely never the fanciest, but it’s by far the most interesting one there:
It was typical in the Maya Classic era to periodically rebuild structures — tearing down old superstructures, covering their platforms with another layer of masonry, building anew on top of them. In some cases, this happened every 20 or 50 years for centuries — that’s why a number of them took on elephantine proportions.
Structure III was different, though. It seems to have been inhabited for the duration of Calakmul’s existence (about 1,500 years), but was never buried and rebuilt. Fairly early in its history, a very well-appointed tomb was built into one of its rear rooms — other than that, it appears that nothing was done to alter its original architecture.
For 1,500 years.
The inhabitants did such a good job of maintenance that when Calakmul was rediscovered 1,000 years after it was abandoned, this was the only structure at the site that wasn’t just a rubble mound. It’s thought that the tomb held one of the original kings of the site, and that Structure III was a palace inhabited by his descendants.
