Equine container cranes
Earlier this month, Stephanie and I took the ferry to the Alameda Antiques Faire, where I expected to take photos of all the wacky stuff for sale, but instead found myself more enamored with the container cranes we saw on the way. I should have known—last time I took the ferry to Alameda, I did exactly the same thing.
Plymouth Valiant
In my past experiments with color-accenting, I started with a color digital photograph and desaturated the background. Given my recent entree into delayed gratification photography, I now have the opportunity to work in the opposite direction: selectively tinting a black and white photo with color. I realize it’s a cheesy gimmick historically reserved for red lips and roses, but it’s one I’ve found particularly compelling for cars and mailboxes.
1960s Plymouth Valiant
VW Bus/Pickup
I don’t know what it is about black and white, but it makes me want to start taking car portraits again. I’m not even that into cars, but there’s something I find irresistible about old cars and cities. They have this uncanny ability to transform an otherwise pedestrian scene into one that looks intentionally composed.
Business in the front
A hybrid commute
Two months ago, not only did we move into our new home, but Simpleform moved into its new office on 2nd Street. As we were living only three blocks from the 16th St. Mission BART station, and I was working only two blocks from the Montgomery St. Station, I became a subway commuter for the first time in my life.
16th Mission Bart Station
After a few weeks, the novelty of being whisked to and fro by mass transit wore off, and I started to miss walking to work. I’ve never been big into gyms, so in the past I’ve tried to integrate walking into my daily routine as much as possible. But now with work just over two and a half miles away, it was a little too far to hoof it twice a day. So I decided to split the difference. I’d BART to work and walk home. The walk only takes about 45 minutes (which is less than my previous walking commute of 30-35 minutes, one way), but I experience so much more of the city, and it gives me an opportunity to take some photos en route.
Do Not Enter Julia St
Container ships forever!
Container Ship Forever Stamp
The USPS says in their press release that:
The Container Ship stamp is based on an undated photograph of the R.J. Pfeiffer, a modern container ship launched in 1992 and operated by Matson Navigation Company. Container ships, pioneered in the 1950s, are key to today’s global economy, carrying manufactured goods worldwide across the oceans and exemplifying the modern merchant marine.
After a cursory search, it appears that the stamp’s illustration was based on a photo from the International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots website, bridgedeck.org.
R.J. Pfeiffer rounding Diamond Head, “a volcanic tuff cone on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu.”
Feral CB750
My walk to work takes me through a lively cross-section of San Francisco: down Fillmore and Church, then across the Mission on 18th Street all the way to Folsom. The beauty below caught my eye a few days ago, and reminded me how I used to walk to work with my camera on the off-chance I’d stumble upon something interesting (even after walking the same route, day after day). So this morning I decided to resuscitate the old habit.
Honda CB750 in the weeds
Beef worthy of a Texas grill
Texas pride can be a little over the top sometimes, so when I saw a steak in the shape of Texas on the side of an H-E-B semi-trailer the other day, I had to get a photo of it. I was driving at the time, so I asked Stephanie to snap these out the window for me (with her original iPhone). It was only after passing the truck that we realized the entire ad was a barbecue-rific recreation of the Texas Flag, complete with “lone star” tongs. Absolutely brilliant!
Thinking to myself: man, what I wouldn’t give to see a Texas-shaped steak sizzlin’ on a Texas-shaped grill.
Intro to Overlanding
Part I
Booking passage on a container ship should have entailed 28 days without internet. But on a whim I looked into satellite phones and discovered that I could rent a “satellite modem” to access the internet anywhere in the world (except the poles). While using it to blog aboard the Cap Cleveland, someone I didn’t know stumbled upon my dispatches and posted a series of links to MetaFilter. As it happens, the MetaFilter post got picked up and “syndicated” by a regional portal of the New York Times. An online communications specialist in Auckland, New Zealand, who monitors such things, stumbled upon the link and followed it to my blog. When she discovered I was going to be landing in Auckland in a few weeks, she left a comment offering to host us for dinner. I reached out to her before we landed and made plans to meet up. (Sound familiar?) When we finally got together, we met her housemate, who told us about her travels earlier in the year: a months long “overland” trip across Africa using a UK-based company called Oasis.
It’s astounding in retrospect how these trivial, circuitous events can combine to alter the course of our lives.
“An overland trip across Africa.” Our curiosity was piqued. At that point we’d only been in New Zealand a week. We didn’t have a clue what we planned to do there, let alone after. When we started looking at Oasis’ website a few weeks later, we were seduced. We’d just begun the spontaneous, go-where-the-spirit-takes-us part of our trip, and we were already finding ourselves challenged by the constant decision-making. The promise of a voyage where everything is figured out for us, and miraculously at a price within our budget, was tantalizing. We wanted to visit Africa as part of this adventure, if possible, and the concept of budget overland travel (which we’d never heard of) sounded like a great way to cover ground in a region that was less backpacker-friendly than, say, Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, we were wary of having commitments in the future weighing on our present decision-making. We wanted our itinerary to be open to the people we meet and the things we learn along the way (even at the cost of having to make all our decisions on the spot). So we put off the overland idea until such time as we found ourselves closer to Africa, assuming that both we and our budget lasted that long.
That time turned out to be February, as we were rounding Southeast Asia and thinking about our onward travel plans. Looking again at the available overland trips, we scaled back our ambitions from a 3 month expedition across Africa (several months of independent travel made us wary of being in close contact with others) to a 3 week jaunt from Kenya to Rwanda and back called Gorillas & Gameparks—which we augmented with the incomparable Maasai Mara safari.
Map of the Gorillas & Gameparks route
Part II
What is this overland travel of which you speak? First, a photo.
The truck: a Scania 93M
