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Friday Slide Show: Miraloma
9 August 2019
We were in something of a quandary. What to have for dinner. We'd already been slaving over the hot stove all week and the ballgame was the YouTube MLB Game of the Week in half an hour so we decided to punt. Pick up burgers in Miraloma a quarter mile away. Unphotogenic (but useful) Miraloma.
It was too cold and windy to make the trek on foot and imagine we could return unscathed in time for the first pitch. Rescuers would find our bodies curled up in the gutter along Portola someplace, burgers petrified in the wind locked in the blackened fingers of our frozen hands.
So we drove. We drove for burgers. And fries.
Isn't hat's how the Great American Novel should begin? Not with a car chase but with a run for burgers. Even if the burger turns out to be a Paris burger with sauteed mushrooms and a pad of Brie.
Unfortunately, we hadn't wasted five minutes trying to make ourselves presentable. So we stayed in the car while Joyce went in for the kill.
As rushed as we were, we remembered to take a smartphone with us. And that was enough to stave off starvation. Of the imagination, anyway.
We thought we'd get in a little practice framing shots with its godawful wide angle lens. From the vantage point of our packed-like-sardines parking place. With our seat belt still on.
If that sounds like a Houdini trick, it just might have been. But having never figured it out, the master magician never performed it in public.
We thought we'd get in a little practice framing shots with its godawful wide angle lens.
The first thing that grabbed our attention was right in front of us. A long list of laundry services. We didn't bother to read it as we framed it in the center of our screen. Too far away. But we knew what we could do with it in post.
We labored to get the parking meters in the shot as well as the neon sign, bleached by the sunlight.
Next we were struck by a flare of cloud hovering over the corner pharmacy. We had a bad angle on it but we liked the skewed view. And the brilliant blue.
Looking out the other side of our compact sedan, we were amused to see a big black pickup truck framed by the passenger window. Who swallowed who?
Desperate for subjects, we could not ignore the rear view mirror either. In contrast to the stores in front of us, it framed a row of houses, the rear deck speakers reflected in the rear window but the night angle of the mirror repeating the houses.
We liked how the evening sun lit our dashboard, so we shot that through our steering wheel which we somehow expected to be in focus, too. Alas, not. What good is a godawful wide angle lens that can't focus in front of its own nose?
We turned back to our left where we had not failed to find amusement in the sky and saw the lines of the car next to us echoed in the partially rolled-down window of our driver's side window.
Not the only echo, though. The side mirrors of the two cars seemed to be lined up, too.
Our electrolytes were burning out, obviously.
Nevertheless, we felt obliged to get a shot of the shops down the sidewalk, so we did that, too. We can't explain why the Post Office box is listing. Or what that guy at the Miraloma Bar is smoking. Or if they're related.
The light hit our car keys just right, too. We dampened the exposure a bit with a forefinger on the screen to salvage the highlights and made the shot, sure we could rescue the shadows in post.
For our finale, we focused on what the side mirror was looking at. A tidy cottage across Portola, nicely frame before the fog swallowed it up. Home, Sweet Home.
By then the burgers and fries were in the car along with Joyce so we put the car in gear to satisfy a different sort of appetite. To our amazement, it started right up.
