Day 8

All right, my last day in the city is already two days in the past. However, I owe this blog a post about it.
This picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in the clouds is from an adventurous hike on the hills of Sausalito, Saturday morning.

Days 6 & 7

Cagil asked for pictures of painted ladies so I went to the Alamo Square which has a famous postcard view, I will show that later.
What I actually wanted to say is, later on I walked from Alamo Square to the Hippie district, had some delicious grilled chicken at Burger Joint and walked up Haight Street. I passed a funny place that looked kinda empty and colorful. A girl was standing out front and smiling at me so I asked her what this is all about. She told me this is a healing place where people come for Yoga and Meditation. She told me that they also have a Sauna and a Jacuzzi in their garden and offered me to join her. Well, I love Sauna and Whirlpools and all those things that make you relax, so I had a closer look. Some people were around, busy with painting walls and creating business cards, they obviously just started this place. However, everybody seemed sane, so I decided to join in for some Sauna :-) It was really great.
I got to talk to the maker of a new Ambient radio station called Sleepbot. Didn't have time to listen to it yet, but it might be similar to Groove Salad - which is nice.
The garden was fantastic. For a while I was all by myself in the water just looking at the stars when I heard some rustling in the bushes. Guess what it was...a Raccoon family. They came very close and stared at me sitting in the water. I did the same. No moving, just starring. I'm good in that :) After a while they slowly but surely made their way back into the bushes...very cute.
So if anybody is interested in this place, here is some more information.

A picture from yesterday.

Day 5

San Francisco days are long. If I don't get up at totally insane times for sunrise shooting, I usually wake up by the noise of roommates or the cleaning lady. I'm an expert now. I found out that the sound of nail clipping works best for waking me up. After breakfast I do mostly nothing but walking. When the sun starts to go down I start photographing, mostly with tripod and exposure bracketing for HDR processing. Yesterday I switched a lot between different ISO settings in order to blend in moving objects (i.e. a cable car) into the images. Similar as I did with the bicyclist in the Frankfurt picture, which is still one of my favorite.
However, looking at the different exposures doesn't really tell me if I'll be happy with the final DRI. Yesterday night I was too tired to process the data, instead I watched Escape form Alcatraz to make the whole Alcatraz experience complete. Watching this movie I gradually got more and more into the mood for old SF movies. As next, I might watch Hitchcock's Vertigo, which happens to rank 35 among the best movies of all times according to IMDB.