Waking up early on a summer day.

Perched atop a tree, chirp. What to do today?

Fourth of July we saw a wind instrument concert in Oak Meadow Park in Los Gatos. I love to look at kettle drums, and to hear them.

And my fellow Los Gatos citizens here amid our signals and wires.

I love propeller hats, I didn’t used to know that anyone actually wore them. But this li’l guy does.

Couple of weeks ago I was at a beatnik themed conference at Fort Mason in SF. The event wasn’t real well attended. I walked around for quite awhile taking pictures. I love corroded, peeling old walls.

V. Vale was there with Marian Wallace, we went up and had a nice cheap dinner at the little-known hostel on the hill behind Fort Mason. I said a few words on Vale and Marian’s panel talk

You can listen to Podcast #86 on the Rudy Rucker Podcasts channel.

I lost my glasses that day, which was bad for me, as it took me nine days to get a new pair. Horrible experience.

Dig the cherub with the rat. It’s on a big sculpture in front of the De Young museum in SF, honoring wine, made by the famed illustrator Gustave Dore.

This is my idea of really successful photo. Shot in Cruz. I love abstract visual designs made up of daily objects. You can see the photo better if you look at the 1200 pixel across version. Should the foreground be in focus or the background? Can be a tough call. I went for the foreground this time. Does that work? How about if you look at the 2400 pixel across version…

Ever since I started shooting with my wonderful wide-angle lens on my Fujifilm digital X100T camera with 22m f2 lens, I’ve been tilting the camera more and more. I picked that up from looking at a lot of Garry Winogrand photos a lot of times. Winogrand used to deny that his camera was tilted. In some higher sense it was level, and I’m starting to get that.

Another nice random pattern photo, a child’s leg with some pens. I prefer not to put the faces of my family on my blog, but this red leg is very expressive in any case.

Another example of the kind of shot I like. Taken on the hill behind Fort Mason looking down at the parking lot. I don’t like seeing parked cars in my photos, they bore me, so I crop them out whenever I can—often using a “tilted” crop frame if that’s what I need. I like the three trees. The godlike trees calm, and the human-street-line-painted parking area all bossy and honking and busy. And the colors are dull, as it’s misty in late afternoon SF.

You can’t do much better than a photo of a neon roller rink sign. When I was little my Mom would drop me at a roller rink in downtown Louisville for an hour or two, and a lot of kids my age would be there skating. I saw my first electronic game ever there, it was a shooting game, you had a “gun” with a metal node on one end and you were looking through the sights at a turning metal disk with planes on it, and when your node touched the bump on a plane while you pulled the trigger you got a point or a beep or something. Paradise.

This is a fat swollen stump near Stow lake in SF. Bloated with life. Everything is alive.

A painting by one of my grandchildren plus a random houseplant. I truly to wish I could paint like a kid. That was one of Master Picasso’s skills. Sometimes I’ll fake it by starting with a kid-like underdrawing, or even copying something from a kid’s painting.

And we saw some turtles in Stow Lake. I rented an electric paddle boat for $14 extra—worth every penny, as son Rudy said. You don’t paddle at all just glide. At first I thought the turtles were bronze sculptures.

This is how I looked when I was just realizing that I’d lost my glasses last week. I was so bummed that I went out and bought two pairs of new ones. Let joy reign unconfined, as my Pop used to say when he’d get some kind of treat for my brother and I after we’d whined for it for a long time.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2015 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.