Bright, dramatic clouds crowned Balboa Park this evening!
I took this series of photographs before sunset, as I walked through San Diego’s world-famous park.
The first photo you see below was taken in front of the Casa del Prado Theater. I then headed west down El Prado, aiming my camera right and left, as the distant California Tower came ever closer.
I finally passed through the California Quadrangle and headed over the Cabrillo Bridge, before making my way home.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Stand by the water at La Jolla Cove and look up toward the buildings on the hill above you. Is that the ocean up there, too?
See that lone palm tree painted on a building with a cloud shaped like a brain hovering above it? That’s one of the Murals of La Jolla, and it’s the creation of an internationally famous conceptual artist, John Baldessari. His Brain/Cloud (with Seascape and Palm Tree), 2011, can be viewed up close by diners at the George’s at the Cove restaurant.
John Baldessari explained: “A brain can look like a cloud if you manipulate it in the right way. We see things in clouds. It looks like it’s hovering almost from outer space. I like banal images and I can’t think of anything more banal than a palm tree and an ocean.”
In the present day, with the rising importance of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, this curious image might suggest something quite different!
Born in National City, Baldessari grew up in San Diego. According to Wikipedia: “In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He taught for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968…” He passed away last year.
Baldessari’s work has been the subject of over 200 national and international solo exhibitions, and his awards are numerous. His provocative art often poses unusual questions, poking at accepted norms, directing the viewer’s perception and mind in unexpected directions.
In the past I’ve photographed a couple other representations of his art, which you can see here and here.
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After I got off from work today, a little before sunset, the sky above Mission Valley was full of dramatic clouds. The weather has been unsettled lately.
As I walked past two tall glassy buildings, dark gray and bright white cumulus clouds in a blue sky were mirrored in the windows…
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
San Diego is now experiencing very unsettled winter weather. High winds, rain, even thunderstorms and a funnel cloud or two. Lots of snow in the mountains to the east.
Today the wind throughout downtown was unusually strong. Especially by the water. Not quite the devastating winds we experienced one night five years ago, when numerous boats were driven into the rocks along the Embaracadero and sank. (You can see those tragic photographs here.)
But I saw flags flapping wildly, palm trees bending as if they were made of rubber, and I had to constantly hold onto my hat!
When I reached San Diego Bay, which is usually calm, I was surprised by the stormy, foaming waves. It always amazes me that deep water can be disturbed powerfully by wind along its surface.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
I took these moody photos yesterday afternoon near South Mission Beach Park and the Mission Beach Jetty. You can see the volleyball courts on the sand. You’ll also see the nearby lifeguard station.
The lowering sun had vanished behind a gray bank of fog drifting in from the Pacific Ocean. I thought I’d snap a few photos to see how they’d come out.
They seem to tell a mysterious story about life.
And about silver that lives in the gray.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
This morning at sunrise I was walking along the edge of Florida Canyon in Balboa Park when I noticed an airplane approaching San Diego International Airport.
As the FedEx cargo plane descended I captured this colorful series of photographs…
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Can you see it in the above photograph? There seems to be a rainbow painting the clouds around the sun!
This and the following photos were taken a couple mornings ago in Mission Valley perhaps an hour after sunrise. I was going through the images just now, wondering if I should use them, when I noticed the rainbow colors!
What’s odd is the sun was in front of me, not behind. Perhaps this mysterious “rainbow” was caused by an interesting combination of refraction and reflection within the layered clouds. Or was this ring of color merely produced by my camera’s lens? That’s probably the explanation. That seems to be the case in the second photo.
These clouds might also be tinted by the last remnants of smoke from a recent wildfire in Mexico, south of Tecate.
I’ve added a little contrast and sharpened most of these photos so you can see more fantastic cloud detail.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
I happened to be in the right place at the right time as the sun set this evening. I was walking along Balboa Park’s West Mesa, looking up at lace-like, brightly lit clouds, when color began to seep into the sky.
As I continued south the sun descended. When I reached Marston Point, the sun’s last red rays peeped over Point Loma in the distance.
In some of these photos you can see not only the nearby buildings of Bankers Hill, but distant Point Loma, and glimpses of San Diego Bay and even North Island. In one photograph you can see a small part of the downtown skyline.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
