Sometimes i set out to photograph the things that i see every day thinking that i can make them look really cool. Instead they turn out looking exactly the way they look every day, which isn’t spectacular but isn’t bad, it just… is. is that bad? good i can’t tell?

I’ve been experimenting with these digital pictures in an attempt to provide you, gentle reader, with stronger content, and thereby better deterring you from your daily regime, er job or whatever.. I’ve been feeling confined by the focal length of my permanently affixed camera lens so I purchased one of those wide-angle adapter things that you screw on the front of a digital camera (or camcorder). The last time i used anything similar to this i was in high-school and had cut lawns, or washed rugs (i used to wash rugs) or served coffee, or something, to pay for it. The acquisition of this lens thing was a pretty big deal in my high-school life. I loaned it to someone later on, in college, who never gave it back. That’s the way that goes sometimes.
I got this one because I was playing with one at a camera store last week and it seemed pretty much ok. I then tracked one down on eBay, waited for the auction to end and convinced the guy to sell it to me for two-thirds of the auction price, all using eBay’s “Contact seller” feature to facilitate the illegal purchase. This is fully and completely in violation of the Terms and Conditions I agreed to upon creation of my eBay user account so many years ago. Am I a bad person, is there something wrong with me? Probably, but it doesn’t have anything to do with my shorting eBay the $4 they would have made off of this purchase.

What I’ve been trying to get at is that these beautiful palm trees lining the Embarcadero are not indicative of real palm trees. They’re real, don’t get me wrong, but these trees were all dropped in here all at once a couple of years after the 1989 earth-quake destroyed the double-decker highway that used to run through here. At a cost of $50,000 each (i have no link, this is just a number I’ve heard mentioned) they look perfect and storybook-like. I present more than $1,000,000 worth of them here for you, in an unspectacular photograph taken with a camera lens stolen from eBay.