My desk looks out onto the backyard so I get an ever-changing view with my morning coffee. Today a couple of ducks who decided to come for a swim in the pool. I wish I was a quicker photographer so I could have gotten more interesting pictures for you, but here are a few. The picture of the pair was blurry, so I decided to make it even more so as to look “arty”. The funny picture I didn’t get is when they caught sight of one of the chickens and swam down to the end of the pool for a closer look. Their heads bobbed and necks craned as they tried to get a better view. Then they found something delicious in the lawn and settled in for a morning snack.

[as always, click a picture to see it bigger. click again to make it go away]

As part of our renovation of the front yard away from lawn and towards more food production, Tom had built a lovely berry fence out of 4x4s and copper pipe. Today we planted some of the plunder brought home from a nursery yesterday. Basically just sticks, they’ll grow to be cane berries, in this case Olallieberries, a Purple Raspberry and “Amity” red raspberry.

We were out at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco yesterday to see what was commonly thought to be the next-to-last day of an exhibit of some drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. That meant we stood in line for close to an hour which also meant that we had time to leisurely observe the rooms which we normally rush through and that I had plenty of time to fiddle with the controls on my camera. Even though the ISO is pushed too high, I liked the way this one turned out. The painting is “Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book” by an anonymous painter in the 16th century.

If you’re interested, the Da Vinci notebook drawings will still be on view for a few more days. Call the museum for the exact closing date. Amazing stuff…

FAMSF: Legion of Honor

On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, I took some shots with my camera phone. Never thinking that the camera phone was much good for anything besides as pictorial memos or to-do items, I was intrigued by the more creative possibilities:

One of the exhibitions going on is called “The Art of Participation”. One of the participatory events is taking portraits of visitors and then displaying them in rotation as part of a piece by Jochum Gerz called “The Gift 2000/2008”. We did it so if you go you might, as Bush quipped, witness our public hanging.

(By the way, the site displays pictures differently now: if you’re using a java-enabled browser, clicking on a picture will open it in a temporary window. To dismiss the photo, just hit “escape” or the “x”. Also, POTD means one of my photos of the day. One of my NY resolutions was to practice more taking pictures.)

SFMOMA