Towse: views from the hill

Taken yesterday at the cozy cottage in the quaint, verdant village, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Untouched by Photoshop or Picasa. …

Sunrise yesterday. The weather has been clear and balmy. Too bad HRHPC and HHCDofwhateveritis missed the lovely weather when they passed through last week.

I’ve decided to stash more pics on flickr. Only drawback there is that the photos are stored in a more compact size and I like the fullsize all-over-your-screen look.

UV liked this one, posted earlier:

and asked, What a gorgeous shot! Did you “do” anything to it?

That’s “as taken.” Must be the new camera! I use Picasa for the quick “straighten that horizon” work that I sometimes need because of sloppiness or the astigmatism. You can also sharpen, highlight, crank up the saturation, crop, &c.

If you spin through a Picasa “library,” you can tell whenever you’ve done anything because Picasa shows you a quick look at the original and then says, “refining.”

I doublechecked and this shot has no “refining” at all.

The camera’s a gem. My first digital camera — purchased June 2004 — was a simple camera to see if I liked shooting digital. This Nikon CoolPix 5600 is more sophisticated, more pixels, optical zoom in additional to digital zoom, more tools.

A nice feature is that if you’re shooting, f’rex, in “sunset” mode, which makes the shutter speed slower than normal and (just suppose) you’re cranked up to 3x optical zoom, and your hand jiggers a bit, the camera very politely sez, “Hey, you up screwed that one. It’s really blurred. Do you really want me to save it?”

Here’s a sunset shot from yesterday. The sun is setting behind me, to the west, and threw some beautiful color on the clouds to the southeast.

A shot from this morning:

And the Abe (which you can see anchored to the south of the Bay Bridge in the sunset picture above) left this morning. The sailors had a liberty weekend. (How many had tickets to see the Stones at SBC Park?) Throughout the visit, there was no news, no protests, no nothing. Here’s a picture as it left, Yerba Buena to your right. Treasure Island and the Admin Building to the left. Berkeley (Hi, Harry! Hi, Don!) in the background.

We were at a neighbor’s Canadian (i.e. “for no good reason with insufficient notice”) party on Saturday. Despite the advice of another neighbor (former bartender) to “drink only wine, beer, brown, clear,” I had far too many pale green minty shots of something and spent yesterday wishing I hadn’t.

At the neighbor party, I met a guy who is a neighbor from the other side of Coit Tower. Mikkel Aaland is a photographer-type who writes about digital photography. We’d been talking about my old camera dying and the search for the new one.

“Which camera?” (meaning the old one) he asked.

“A no-name camera, really.”

“Which one?”

“A Concord.”

“Oh. So, what did you buy?”

“A Nikon.”

“CoolPix?”

“5600.”

“Good camera.”

Yay. Always nice to have your choices affirmed by someone who knows more than you do.

UV sed, New cameras are always so much fun.

Indeed.

Speedy’s New Union Grocery at the top of Telegraph Hill is up for sale. Made famous as “Jiffy’s Market” in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, Speedy’s serves up groceries, wine, sandwiches and more in the ground floor of a 1914 building.

$225K for the business. Building not included.

Here’s your chance to become part of the continuing history of San Francisco.

A Cyber Curmudgeon told me about this one …

You can get a keychain with the countdown. Ah, American entrepreneurism. Brings a warm glow to my heart just thinking of it.

Mohandas K. Gandhi statue. 

… is OPEN! for business.