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Friday Slide Show: Ten Thousand Steps
4 May 2018
Blame Harold Davis. He's off on this pilgrimage, hiking through the Spanish countryside as spring brings everything to life, having a ball. And we're stuck here watching the fog roll in like it's summer.
But wait. "Here" is San Francisco, so we can't complain. We just have to get out of the house. With our old Nikon D200 (can't complain about that either since it was once Camera of the Year) and our even older 35mm f2.8 Nikkor.
And once out of the house, we just have to walk. Like Davis. Although, we can take a circuitous route so we end up back where we started even if it takes an hour and a half and covers a couple of miles or 10,000 steps, according to our iPhone.
But we aren't calling this the 10,000-step calorie-burning slide show.
All of a sudden everything seems to be posing for you.
No, we're calling it the Ten Thousand Steps slide show. Sort of a pilgrimage, that is, through the surrounding neighborhoods of Golden Gate Heights and the inner Sunset.
Nothing at all makes this special.
Everything was there the day before and will be there the day after. Some of it has been around a long time and will be around longer. And some of it not.
The exercise here was to have a look. See what we could see. Put the discerning eye to work as much as our two feet.
It didn't hurt, by the way, to restrict ourselves to that prime lens. We found we had to back up and move closer to frame the image just right. And that adds steps, you know.
It also didn't hurt to spend nearly two hours at it. You get in the flow. Eventually. All of a sudden everything seems to be posing for you.
Which is a lesson worth remembering when you look out the window at that familiar scene and can't think of anything you'd like to go out to shoot.
You can't see it from there. Go out. Shoot.
And don't come back until you've covered Ten Thousand Steps.
