June 29, 2011 – Field Guides

Being someone who loves the outdoors and hiking, of course I have a bookshelf full of nature and field guides including some of the distinctively blue Peterson Field Guides. I suspect these might be seen as a quaint collection in a few years. I can already hear young whippersnappers telling me, “There’s an app for that.” One day soon your phone might be able to recognize the image of any plant or animal you show to it. It will recognize the sound and then tell you the name of the bird. You might be trying to get a signal and, I could have told you, that’s a mountain lion that has it’s jaw clamped on your head….

In the meantime, I’ll stick to my old fashioned, field guides. They go with me on road trips and, if not too heavy, maybe in the backpack too. And just in time for summer in San Francisco, a new page not quite out of the Peterson guides, the various fogs of San Francisco.

January 30, 2011 – It’s all about the light

This morning is one of the reasons I live in San Francisco. It’s all about the light. The light in the Bay Area is unique. It’s easier to render in a painting that it is to describe in words. After a dry few weeks in a wet winter, the rain came down last night. A front is blasting through. My windows are open letting in cold, crisp and amazingly clean air. The clouds are still lifting letting in these intense bursts of bright white light. Light that has the houses climbing up to Buena Vista glowing while the park looms dark and wet waiting for the day to dry out.