Details from Downtown

Some street and abstract shots from my time wandering downtown this morning. Great light this morning…

Old corrugated sheet metal and a bit of weathered wood. Found in an alley.

Wooden doors. Near 21st street and Q.

Beautiful weathered surfaces, deep shadows and bright light.

A little bit of corrugated heaven.

“All is light and shadows.” ~ Michael Todd Thorpe

The palm trees in front of Sinaloa mexican restaurant. Early morning, downtown Bakersfield.

Old sidewalk stamp from 1928. Bakersfield, California.

1919

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1919

Sometimes I get stuck for photo ideas. When that happens, one of the things I like to do is a little photo exercise. I stop in the downtown area and take a walk with my camera. I start by shooting anything and everything, taking pictures just to take pictures. Snap, snap, snap. Get the eye looking and the finger twitching and the mind seeing. Most of those shots are crap; bad composition, to bright or dark, whatever. I throw those away. Delete. But then things start to fall into place. The mind warms up, the images start to come and things start to click. I did that exercise tonight on my way home for work, walking around for about twenty minutes before the daylight gave out.

Nile Skies

Aside from an obligatory wedding tomorrow afternoon, I’m looking forward to a long and quiet weekend. I’ve taken this Monday off, extending my weekend to four days. Too bad I won’t be at the beach. Ah, well, at least there’s iced tea and the air conditioning.

We’ll probably hunker down and try to keep the excitement to a minimum. The dogs will be reacting to all the fireworks and the neighborhood’s requisite piccolo petes. Sophie will need to be reassured, Jack usually does fine, not sure how Teddy will react.

Last night we had an odd situation. One of the neighbor kids tossed a baby doll over the fence and apparently caught Teddy off guard. He was quite perturbed by the sudden arrival of something strange that looks like a human landing in his yard. He would just hunker down and very cautiously approach, slinky style, not wanting to get too close, with a deep rumble in his chest. It was just past dusk and that made it all the weirder, Cathi called me to look at the spectacle… pretty funny…

I stopped on H street on my way in to work this morning, wandering with my camera between the Padre hotel and the Nile theater, taking pictures. The sky was dusted with clouds and looked like a painting. I shot a few pictures and posted this in my PAD (Photo-A-Day) gallery.

I was pretty happy with this:

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