matt's pictures

kareem's onesie party

My friend Kareem throws these every other year or so, always a good crowd of people there. This was mid-January, so it was still a bit chilly outside. Appropriate weather for onesies.

Posted on 2018-04-11T05:56:45Z GMT

This was a super brief visit to WildCare, where things were pretty chill at the end of a Saturday. Looking at the Pelican, and having spent no small amount of my younger years staring at dinosaur skeletons, drawings, simulations, and the movie Jurrassic Park, I don’t know how anyone can not see that these are 100% dinosaurs. They don’t move like reptiles. They’re not even shaped like reptiles.

The photos of the bird were taken through the cages; none of them save the last one was in the open. The trick to getting photos that aren’t completely blocked up with fence is to get as close as you can to the wires, open your lens all the way up, and find a hole. Pay attention to the viewfinder, and move around until the picture looks the most clear. It should go without saying, but here I am saying it anyway: don’t do this in the case that it might put you in danger. As Clayton Cubitt said on twitter:

Famed war photography Robert Capa once said "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough" but he also died at 40 when he stepped on a land mine, so "closeness" is not always what it’s cracked up to be.

https://t.co/4LZtkL0nTo pic.twitter.com/INWxIDrk2d— Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt) April 3, 2018

I’ve gotta say, though: Capa was making important pictures; he knew that; he also knew the stakes. Vitam impendere vero.

Peregrine Falcon; if and when I ever get a bird tattooed on me, it’ll be on of these. The aforementioned pelican before feeding. Pelican, getting fed. Owl doesn’t give a shit. This guy was a former resident, nests in the nearby woods now. Always comes back at feeding time, even though they haven’t given him food in a long time.

Posted on 2018-04-10T05:29:46Z GMT

out of the city

Pictures while a passenger in the car. This night there was a lot of traffic for some reason. Took us almost an hour just to get out of town, in one of those weird later-at-night traffic jams that happen sometimes for seemingly no reason on a thursday.

I’ve definitely taken this first picture before; the astute among my readers may note that the car is pointed in the opposite direction, and, in fact, we weren’t leaving the city then, so this post title is a lie. “into and out of the city” just didn’t sound as good.

Posted on 2018-04-08T23:13:45Z GMT

project san pablo at night

We’re finally caught up to the current year; this set of photos was taken January 9th, just after new years’. Mike wanted to get dinner, I wanted to go climbing, we split the difference and went for a walk up SAN PABLO (getting dinner along the way).

Still a work in progress. …

Posted on 2018-04-08T03:15:10Z GMT

berkeley rose garden / stair walk

This was, I think, the day before Thanksgiving? Sophie’s mom and also Serena were in town, and we had an afternoon to kill. She’s been around here enough that all the regular tourist stuff was played out, so we did something more local-ish. The stair walks are from a book, Secret Stairs: East Bay. I believe it’s a series, even. Anyway, there are detailed instructions for how to find the trail for what amounts to an urban hike. This one starts and ends at the Berkeley Rose Garden.

As you might imagine, there are a lot of stairs, but it’s a reasonable balance of up and down, such that I didn’t feel too strained (he says, 6 months later). There were a couple really amazing, sweeping panoramic views of the bay. I’ve only put one here, just because when you’ve seen one spectacular sunset photo from roughly the same square mile of the hills, you’ve seen them all. The experience of coming around a corner and looking to your side to see it, that never gets old.

edit: added another sentence so the last graph doesn’t trail off