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.

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.