Still Hanging Out in California

I was hanging out in a parking lot behind a restaurant, waiting for a take out order. I thought the scene would be too contrasty for my old film camera but I decided to try it anyway.


This time of day, there is a fair amount of foot and bicycle traffic on the odd little bit of street , heading toward and away from campus. I thought this lady was a nice companion for the two little trees. It was a couple weeks before I got the film processed. It gives you time to forget exactly what you were doing that day and be pleasantly surprised sometimes.

It took me forever to figure out how to insert this image but my housemate found the magic button. Thank goodness for another pair of eyes. This image was taken with my recently acquired (february) mechanical film camera. It's like the first SLR I ever owned, an Olympus OM1n, but with a broken light meter. As I remember, the Olympus had some light meter issues too. It's amazing to go from the seemingly endless adjustments of a digital camera to a camera with an aperture ring and a shutter speed dial and pretty much nothing else but your brain, experience and imagination. After almost forty-five years, I've come full circle.

These shows are very similar in spite of the period difference, one modern, the other Joseon era. In the first one, a crown prince with amnesia finds himself in a village where he doesn't quite fit in. In the second, a lady dentist who put her patient's welfare ahead of corporate profits finds herself exiled from Seoul to a small fishing village where she doesn't quite fit in. Both piss off the locals but later redeem themselves. Kim Seon-ho plays the second male lead in Prince and first lead in Hometown. In both, the hometown folks have a hard time respecting personal boundaries. Both shows reminded me of Doc Martin.
Here is a totally unrelated image. When I was a kid, one of my adult cousins had one of these. Except his was black.

This picture marks the day we rode on public transit again. The SFMuni bus was every bit as filthy as I remember them being. We wore masks, but it was the Geary line so we had to hang on for dear life. Used hand sanitizer after we got off. I used to have a lot more confidence in my immune system.