Must Be Art Weblog

I found myself at Balboa Park yesterday, because the museum store at MoPA was having a closing-down-for-renovation sale. It was an absolutely perfect day at the park, thanks to a warm Santa Ana wind blowing in from the desert. Besides purchasing a stack of photography books at up to 70% off, I happened upon an open rehearsal of the San Diego Youth Symphony and thoroughly enjoyed lurking at the back of the room while they worked on music for a concert on Feb 15. I even recorded a few bits of it on my iPhone, and the recordings came out surprisingly well, considering.

At the rest break in the middle of the rehearsal, I went to my car and swapped the two heavy bags of books for one heavy camera bag. After rehearsal, I wandered around the park a bit and made a few pictures. Not as many as a typical Balboa Park photo shoot. When I examined the pictures today, I discovered there was a recurring theme in most of them: they show people near the ground.

Since any photography can be turned into Art by sufficient explication, the existence of this theme is crucial to the artistic integrity of my new short subject, Near the Ground at Balboa Park.

Pharmacy Soda Shoppe, originally uploaded by Must Be Art.

Here we all are at an authentic old soda shoppe in Houston Heights,
where the soda comes in cans nowadays but the service is just as surly
as ever.

_C9P3918, originally uploaded by Must Be Art.

This is from a photo session a few months ago.

Actually it’s just a test posting to see how posting from Flickr works.

Part of the recent renovation of my San Diego house was the addition of a short length of rain gutter, to protect the front door (and people approaching said door) from excessive splashing. I didn’t do this last time because there is no good place for a downspout for this gutter. Since then, I’ve learned about rain chains. A decorative chain hangs down from the gutter to the ground, and rainwater runs down the chain.

This works, as I’ve seen at my Palomar Mountain house. But it wasn’t really working in San Diego, as I found out when we finally had a rainy day. The rain wasn’t clinging to the chain, and the ground at the base of the chain was eroding away because I hadn’t protected it.

So, today I installed two enhancements. At the top, I installed a sort of funnel to further encourage the water to hook up with the chain instead of free-falling to the ground. At the bottom, I put down some rocks.

Now I just need another rainy day to find out whether it worked.

Here are the rocks:

And here is a look up into the spout at the end of the rain gutter. You can see a sort of star-shaped opening — that’s the bottom of the new funnel.