Yesterday and today were declared “Spare the Air” days in the San Francisco Bay area. There is a silver lining behind this gray (brown?) cloud, especially for Bay Area photographers with some time on their hands – like me, since I’m a college faculty member who doesn’t return to classes until late September.

On Spare the Air days, almost all Bay Area rapid transit systems offer free passes. (A few, like BART, Caltrains, and ferrys do charge after 1:00, but others are free all day.)

It is no secret that the challenges of photographing in San Francisco and surrounding areas include a) getting there, and b) parking! Spare the Air Day neatly solves both issues.

Since I live in the South Bay Area and like to shoot on foot in the city, my plan went something like this. Up at 4:45 a.m., I caught a bus near my house that took me to a Caltrain station in time to catch a very early “Mini Bullet Train” that gets to San Francisco in about an hour. I was off the train and walking toward The Embarcadero a few minutes after 7:00 a.m. (Another “silver lining” – on typical hot Spare the Air days there is shirt-sleeve weather even in the early morning in San Francisco.) There is a lot to photograph on the walk between here and the Ferry Building, and it took me a good hour and a half to finally make it to espresso at the Frog Hollow Farms shop. In the past, I’ve gotten on one of the free-today ferries to Sausalito or elsewhere, but today I decided to wander up into San Francisco and do some photography on the street. A bit after 10:30 and I was back at the Caltrain station, ready to catch a train back home.

A couple notes. I’ll post a few photos here in the next week or two – but go here if you just can’t wait. And, yes, I managed to completely avoid driving yesterday and I hope to do so again today – though today I’ll be taking a bus to the college to work on moving my office…

OK, one photo:

San Francisco Bay Bridge. San Francisco, California. July 29, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.