Digging Up The Street In La Mesa

        Over the last few months, crews have been tearing up streets in my neighborhood. They have slowly migrated their way down the street and around the corner. At one point they accidentally knocked over a fire hydrant, which created a great firefighter and water filled photo-op for me.

Worker Emerges From The Street

        When I capture images of people, I prefer the subject not be posed, just captured. I like natural looking, spontaneous images and if the subject happens to be smiling that’s just fine, as long as they aren’t told to, “look at the camera and smile.” As I snapped photos of the work area, the man above emerged from the giant hole in the street and happened to look at the camera.

Photography Helps Us To Reflect

        After all, we are human beings and not vampires. With or without a mirror in front of us, we should be able to reflect with impunity. I believe that photography enables us mere mortals to do just that. Ever since 1826, we have been able to reflect on events that took place before our birth and reflect on places we have never been… All thanks to photography.

Iceplant Flowers

San Diego’s PETCO Park & Bridge To Nowhere

        I have grown in these first few days of 2010. Apparently, my personal possessions have grown with me. My camera has grown so large that recent digital images (pictures) taken make the world seem very small… Relatively speaking.

        Tilt-shift lenses have created a renaissance, or perhaps the actual creation of faux miniature photography. It is a neat effect, and if it is a genre of photography that existed before digital, I am not aware of any examples. I do not own a tilt-shift lens, but I do happen to own Photoshop CS4, so I can fake it like a pro.

Imperial Beach Dinosaur Cage

        The above photo is a repeat. Sorry. It was featured in a blog post I wrote up back in June 2009, and I really like this shot. Miniature photography seems to me to be a uniquely digital photographic genre.

The Grit Of The Race Transfers To The Grain Of The Film

        Old Town was the target, but without looking I shot Qualcomm Stadium right in the face.  The general atmosphere around San Diego was 101F, so all the earlier predictions of snowball fights by dinner had been handily dismissed.  These men, members of SDKA battled over scorching pavement and even hotter internal combustion engines.

A Wasp Displaying Full Mating Colors

        These creatures, boldly painted in colors of BAM and WOW grabbed pavement like American Congressmen grab ass. The San Diego Karting Assossiation (SDKA) do what they do because they love to do it, and they do it for free. They dared any mortal man to stop them, but the only mortal man present was me, and I was busy doing other things.  These 2-stroke warriors were definitely in charge.

Who Do You Think Will Win?

        Kart racing is a cross between racing a real car and pushing a grocery cart, with the obvious exclusion of the groceries.  With a gap between them slimmer than Sunday coupons these two racers tied at the Finnish border, only to remember later that the end of the race was in America, at the FINISH LINE.  They hurried back from Northern Europe and still claimed first & second place. SDKA racers know what they are doing!

Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer GO!

        This is not Speed Racer, and I have no idea if this guy won or not.  Seeing them do what they do in the heat that they do it in makes it very easy to watch their cartoons, but impossible to emulate them. SDKA is very special because it bring Kart Racers from all over San Diego together.

And The Winner Is!

I think this SDKA racer either won the race or was heading toward an area that was significantly cooler that his present location.

With the calm and coolness of a man about to commit murder, this guy taunted the leaf before smashing it under his foot.  There was nothing I could do, because I really didn’t care if he smashed the leaf or not.  What I did care about was ensuring the final moments of this leaf would be recorded by me, so that no one could accuse me of fabricating these particular events.

The unmarked grave, somewhere near the Mexican border this leaf is now resting in will one day become a sacred and hallowed place, but until that time, it will just have to be a field behind an empty warehouse.

One day, this leaf will join it’s carbon family, and may become oil itself, or might become a part OF the oil, like his bottled friends to the right.  Either way, they will say that it went before it’s time.  It was sent to whatever is next through an act of murder.  Distraught over the loss of their friend, most of the other trees in the area threw their leaves to the ground that fall…  All except the pine trees, who didn’t seem to care at all.

Foreground: All that remains of the I.B Limited Miniature Railroad. Background: Dinosaur Cage.

The Navy’s 800 foot diameter dinosaur cage on the southern tip of Coronado Bay has contained some of the more vicious breeds of dinosaurs ever created through genetic engineering.  From 1964-1999, the USN denied the very existence of the cage and it’s contents, despite being located in plain view of the busiest beach in all of California.

In the late 1980′s an author named Michael Crichton was marooned on Coronado during a bridge closure and while exploring the Silver Strand in that interim, came upon the cage, and was inspired to write a novel that would ultimately force the United States Government to admit the existence of the cage, and the poor location they selected to place it.

You see, after having George Lucas read “Jurassic Park” to him as a bedtime story, Steven Spielberg decided to make a movie about dinosaurs…  REAL dinosaurs.  Spielberg and crew managed to steal a few dinosaurs from the cage, film them for Jurassic Park and expose the truth to the world.  Forced with seeing dinosaurs on the big screen that looked exactly like dinosaurs living in the cage the Navy claimed didn’t exist was just too much evidence.  In 1999 the Navy admitted the cage was there, executed the dinosaurs and abandoned the site.

Becoming smaller & smaller in our minds ever since, the site was then used as the location for a beach side miniature railroad, but was destroyed in 2003 by miniature plane enthusiasts during The Centennial of Flight Celebration Riots.