Mill Valley

Coyote Creek from behind the closed Dipsea Cafe.

I had a free Thursday and decided to take an old camera out for a field trip. I decided to go "old school" and use my X-Pro 1 along with an 18mm F 2.0 Fujinon lens, one of the company's Holy Trinity of lenses that premiered with the camera. My choice resulted from my discovering that the camera had been in storage for a long time and that the battery had completely died. After installing a fresh battery and resetting all of the defaults, I decided to get reacquainted with the beast and take it for an outing.  It turned out to be a lesson in appreciating how far the technology has come since the X-Pro1's introduction in 2012. For instance the lack of eyepiece diopter adjustment made it difficult to compose with anything more than a suggestion of how much detail I could achieve when focusing. I found myself making the exposure (I was shooting aperture priority) and viewing it on the LCD. I believe this is due to transitioning of my progressive bifocals blurring the viewfinder. Also, the camera is very slow when compared to more recent iterations of the X-Pro family.

To compensate for the inability to adjust the diopter of the eyepiece, I began checking the LCD display after each shot. This gave me an opportunity to examine the entire image by looking at the image, rather than viewing it through the camera itself. I was forced to evaluate the composition in its entirety, rather than centering my attention on the center of the image. I found myself re-composing and retaking my images in the way I did before going to the mirrorless format. I found that this system of shoot-and-peek made me evaluate the composition more critically, and it helped me catch several missteps in framing that I immediately corrected.

Intersection of the Shoreline Highway and Almonte Blvd. 

This collection of businesses, two crow-flight miles southeast of Mill Valley's main drag, are both eclectic and colorful.  Again, Marin county shows off the creativity of its residents in a variety of ways, from strategically placed organic sculptures to bold paint schemes sprinkled  throughout the city.

Fence Festooned, Native Plant Nursery, Mill Valley

The surfer's booties, along with an errant cowboy hat, were found on the spires of this wrought iron fence. One can always speculate on who decided this would make for an interesting contrast of ideas, something of a surf-and-turf of clothing. 

This excursion at the fringe of Mill Valley provided some new subjects to photograph, and in this particular locale, an opportunity to mourn the loss of the Dipsea Cafe, the only local restaurant I knew that served rainbow trout on the weekend brunch menu. Such a loss.