Room & Chair, #1

For today's post, the first of an occasional series of Room & Chair.

Where: the office of the Homestead Cafe in Inyokern, California.

When: 27 December 2009.

Why: hope, abandoned. When I peered through the broken window of the small building next to the cafe I spotted a single chair in a dilapidated room. The office chair, presumably from when the business was an ongoing concern, now vacant - along with the owners and the clientele.

Convergence

Parallel tracks, coming from everywhere and going, nowhere? Along a railroad siding on the way to San Juan Bautista, stitched panorama from eight individual photographs taken from between the tracks.

(Click for much larger version)

Panoramic photography has always fascinated me - the distorted perspectives that arise are often unpredictable, the final product either surprising or disappointing depending on expectations. Or in the case of this photograph, the final product was both - I was at first horrified at what had emerged from the stitching, but the starkness brought out by the near infra-red black and white conversion brought out what I was originally trying to convey from the scene.

Looking backwards, looking forwards

I look where I've been through the pictures I've taken, each image locked in an intricate dance of 1's and 0's on my computer - the vast majority never seeing the light of day. Today I begin to catch up on a years worth of moments in time from journeys through California, my home state, which all seems so ordinary because it is home.

Now for the tough part - deciding what to post; digging through thousands of pictures, looking for what I did and where I've gone the past year.

2009: The Year of the Bicycle

In May of 2009 I finally bought a bicycle, for entertainment, exercise, and basic neighborhood transportation. As a side benefit, it did help protect my sanity as an escape pod at the end of the workday, to relieve stress. It has replaced my car for basic errands around town, and I've noticed that I eat lighter if I have to pedal all of my groceries home in my backpack.

Fortunately, San Jose is a very bike friendly city and I live close to Campbell Park with an entrance to the Los Gatos Creek Trail. If you look closely at my bicycle in the panorama pictures, you'll see a tiny Pelican case bolted to the seat tube where I carry a Canon 2100is camera on my rides. The Panoramas were stitched together in Photoshop CS4, and they usually cover 180° field of view.

From home, the first bridge I cross on my way to the trail is over San Tomas Expressway on this pedestrian bridge.

Along the creek are a few bridges, with a bike path on each side of the creek.



As the trail passes through Los Gatos, it turns to an elevated boardwalk.




In Los Gatos, the creek trail crosses over highway 17 on a bridge with brightly painted murals along the walls.



At the end of the creek is Lexington Reservoir, just a couple of miles down from where my brother David lives.



Now that I've broken the ice off of the blog in 2010, it's time to dredge up the interesting pictures I've got squirreled away in the deep, dark recesses of my hard disk.

More soon, I promise!

Jerry.