I just stumbled on this image I made at Baker Beach, San Francisco. I was glancing through folders of old captures as as I began to overhaul the filing structure and backup system for all my digital captures. Yes, I know how nerdy that sounds (and is), but I’m seriously looking forward to having easy access to all my captures in one, new, streamlined Lightroom catalog. Yes, I know, digital workflow snooze. But I have no doubt this long overdue process will allow me to WAY increase chance encounters with nice singles like this one — not to mention help me to create better collections for photo stories and motion projects.

When I spotted this image, I thought, “Huh? I took this?”

You see, this gold-toned rocky sunset seascape is not my style — at all — but the image looks OK, and it is a nice reminder of how close the heart of San Francisco lies to stunning nature. That was the best part of living in SF. (Although, if you look closely you will note that much of the “natural”-looking, out-of-focus distant cliff-face is actually made up of San Francisco real estate.)

I made this image when Michael, my best SF-buddy, and I were taking one of our regular walks on the beaches of San Francisco. This day clothes were necessary (shucks!) as we were being hit by blustering, salty winds as we scampered over rocks in November 2004. I had my Nikon D70, and was getting ready for my big Paraguay trip in January 2005.

Contrary to what this image and my latests posts might have you think, I am hardly a fine-arts oriented person, and certainly not in regard to photography. Nonetheless, as I was playing with the last posts, my screen overfilling with random video snapshots, I couldn’t help but fancy this composition. It seemed to speak very well to the lengthy conversations I have been having with Andrew Matusik, a young, highly driven, impressively successful commercial photographer. He is a total new-era photographay techno geek, yet he absolutely retains much the artistic sentiments that drove him to study fine art painting at Occidental College, long before he turned to photography.

One thing that Matusik and I talked about as I gathered information for a series of three articles I am writing about him is photographic collage that he recently constructed for GenLux Magazine. The piece — comprising more than 100 images and more than 120 Photoshop layers — is based on Matusik’s MC-Escher-esque photographic interpetation of a vision from his own dreamscape. I don’t recall my own dreams too often, but looking at my screen just now and seeing this same woman on the same bus, looking at herself, staring at the viewer, quitely passive but in a world of visual movement created by the juxtiposition of images, well, I just couldn’t help but hit “Apple + Shift + 4″ and grab this image. Captured from a computer monitor at a mere 72 dpi, this photograph (if that’s the right term) would  never pass technical muster for a standard print publication. But you can see it just fine, no?