The Photojojo 0.48x wide-angle converter is a decent lens accessory. While it’s a bit more suited to lens diameters in the 52mm to 58mm range, the tilt-shiftesque fringing that it added to shots taken with my Canon 15-85mm IS USM, 72mm diameter lens produced an interesting aesthetic. With that lens, a focal length exceeding 25mm was necessary to capture a full APS-C frame that wasn’t partially occluded by the ring adapter.

This shot was taken at a 73mm focal length and shows the edge fringing clearly. At these higher zoom-levels, manual focus was absolutely necessary because the fringing wreaked absolute havoc with the autofocus.

The shot above was taken at 35mm and doesn’t exhibit as much distortion from the wide-angle converter. I applied a Filter Forge 3 frame to make the fringing at the edges less noticeable. It was taken from the roof of 1535 Mission Street which is right at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.

After our epic 7 mile hike around Blithedale Summit Open Space Preserve in Mill Valley yesterday, Rachel and I managed to muster up enough energy to organize a one mile walk around Urbano Street today in the little Ingleside Terrace neighborhood in San Francisco. Where we live in SF is only about two miles from Entrada Court. So, it’s rather sad that in the four years that we’ve lived in the city we hadn’t gotten over there to explore the neighborhood built around a racetrack. You can see the outline of the track in the GPS tracks we followed along the walk.

That circle in the middle of the track is Entrada Court. There’s a massive concrete sundial constructed right in the center of an elaborate garden. I took six pictures there with my iPhone 4 and merged them into a panorama with Photoshop (and filling in missing parts of the sky with Content Aware Fill (don’t ask)). What’s amusing is that the girl on the bike just kept riding in circles around Entrada Court over and over again. So, she appears in the panorama four times. Rachel is also standing there in the far right of the picture being annoyed that I was getting in the way of her taking a picture with her Panasonic TZ10.

The base of the sundial is now filled in. But, originally, it appeared to have a circular reflecting pool beneath it with two bronze seals and colored lights with grass growing around the perimeter. Now, the entire perimeter is concrete and the roman numerals are colored.

You can see the current state of the hour markers here. We also noticed that the shadow appeared to be a bit early on the dial. Perhaps this is due to the solar noon of San Francisco being slightly off during the winter months.

The Bay Citizen recently published an article (picked up by the New York Times here) elaborating on how the sundial was constructed to lure people into buying homes in Ingleside Terrace. In it, they describe the christening of the dial.

The sundial was dedicated on the evening of Oct. 10, 1913, at a lavish event with 1,500 people in attendance. After children dressed as nymphs unveiled the sundial and four surrounding columns, a midnight supper was served, and couples danced until dawn.

Unbeknownst to the revelers in 1913, the sundial itself would not be scaled by human feet until November 2009 when intrepid Flickr user yelserpluapnaes literally rose to the occasion by running full speed straight up the face of dial.

FoundSF has an article and a picture from the early ’20′s showing the dial surrounded by a cavalcade of cars, a large truck filled with people, a large estate, and five largish houses.

The article on FoundSF with the photos from the 1920′s appears to be incorrect though. Horse racing ended at the track in 1898 because it became illegal to gamble horses and then automobile (i.e. “loco-mobile”) racing stopped in 1905 for business reasons. Starting in 1910, Ingleside Terrace was built around Urbano Street which was the old race track. Outside Lands has a picture of horse racing at the track in the late 1890′s courtesy of Greg Gaar.

Outside Lands has another article about the auto racing with a great shot of the “loco-mobiles” from 1900 here.

San Francisco has quite a number of incongruous sites like the Ingleside Sundial. However, I’m slightly dismayed that it took a New York Times article to alert me to something that’s a mere 10-minute-bicycle-ride away from my house.

CA-70, Pulga, CA

Near Chester, California

First attempt using a Canon EOS 7D.

For being such a small camera, the Panasonic TZ5 does a pretty decent of job shooting bracketed images. Bracketing is where you shoot three differently exposed shots and then use software like Photoshop CS4 or Photomatix Pro to blend them together to produce a high-dynamic range (HDR) photograph. Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with bracketing, HDR, and various software to produce some fairly stunning results. Out of all those, these are my greatest hits.

Austin Creek Fire Road

This shot was taken near Guerneville, CA at the Austin Creek State Recreational Area which is adjacent to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. Taking pictures under a forest canopy is tricky. And, to be honest, most of the shots I’ve attempted in these conditions normally don’t amount to anything. Doing HDR and applying some “highlight” adjustments create a stunning result about 10% of the time. I was lucky here because this turned out the best out of anything I’ve shot in the ubiquitous redwood parks surrounding the Bay Area.

San Francisco Park Presidio

The Presidio is another area where it’s difficult to take decent photographs due to the sun shining down through gaps in the canopy. It’s similar to the redwood parks in that images tend to be overexposed in parts and underexposed in others due to beams of sunshine sparsely illuminating the groves of trees. This image turned out quite well, but there’s some rippling at the bottom you can see at high-resolutions due to the fact I was sans tripod on this walk.

Foggy Golden Gate Bridge

The following HDR I took from the Marin Headlands. It was a bit of a chore finding a place to sit the camera on the mini-tripod. My normal procedure is to set a two second timer and leave the camera resting on a fence post before shooting an HDR up there. Small movements in the exposure can wreak havoc with Photomatix Pro. On this one, I feel like I turned the saturation up a bit too high, but people seem to like it.

Here is a link to all of my other HDR images.

Who knew that press conferences could be so entertaining? Maybe I should give Fox News another chance.

How do you feel right now?
I feel like, right now, my haircut is pretty perfect, but altogether I want to redirect back towards haircuts of the ’70s.

The days, the weeks, the months have passed
Another year is done
So, it’s time for me to say
Happy Birthday, Son.
I wish you health, I wish you wealth
I wish you carefree living
And, as well as Happy Birthday
Have a great Thanksgiving!

Well, I went over to Nuggethaus today because he was having a free empower adapter give-a-way over there at 3:30PM. Apparently, I was late by a few minutes because the place was locked up tight like a squirrel when I got there. I later found out that Nugget was home, but locked away in his vaulted server room provisioning a new OC-192c line and training his cat to walk with little mops on his feet to clean the floor. As I left, I saw a partially completed crossword puzzle on the lawn that I picked up and cross the top it read, “What kind of idiot made this puzzle?”. I thought briefly about what kind of mindset someone would have to be upset by a puzzle. Nugget insists that the crossword was done by his neighbor, Hambone something-or-other. I’m not sure that Hambone really exists.

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