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So on Saturday I went and photographed some flowers and petals and stuff.

Which was all very nice, and nobody got manhandled by bunch of police officers.

Jules Mattsson, on the other hand, is a photojournalist, so on Saturday he went to take some photos of the Armed Forces Day parade. Here's how it went:

Note the veritable  smörgåsbord of pseudo-legal bullshit offered up as cause for his detention. There's coverage of the incident on the British Journal of Photography, here, and also advice for photographers here.

After two days in Silicon Valley I transferred up to San Francisco. My stop in the city was a short one – a whole day Saturday, plus half of Friday and some time on Sunday before heading to the airport – so it was bound to be a case of picking a few things to check out rather than an exhaustive tour of the area. So what did I learn? Well..

Take walking shoes

I like walking, and I've always thought walking around a city as far as you can manage in a day is a good way to get a feel for it – I've tried this in just about every place I've visited over the years.

In San Francisco I arrived at 1pm, so carved a path down Nob Hill, through Market Street to the Ferry Building, up to the Coit Tower, down to Fisherman's Wharf, along the coast to Golden Gate Park, South to Haight/Ashbury and then back via Isotope Comics on Fell St. Coit Tower gives you a nice view over the city – here's looking towards the Ferry building:

.. and in the West I passed the splendidly mad Palace of Fine Arts, sadly surrounded by chain-link fence and signs soliciting donations to help save it:

The whole circuit, including long stops at various museums, restaurants and, er, to buy comic books, only took the afternoon, but it took in some pretty lengthy hills – especially ascending to Coit Tower from the East, and coming up North towards Haight from the shore. If I'd been wearing fancy shoes instead of a pair of battered New Balance my feet would have died.

You also get to stumble across interesting stuff that you wouldn't otherwise find, from huge signs:

to tiny ones:

Four wheels bad, two wheels good

I'd heard that it was easy to rent a bike in San Francisco – and having visited I can confirm that it'd be hard *not* to rent a bike in San Francisco. The tourist-trap that is Fisherman's Wharf (more later) is covered in huge bike rental stands with young men and women hollering for customers to BIKE THE BRIIIDGE in a way that seems likely only to put you off the idea.

Anyhow, on the second day – with the fog burning off and a few hours to kill – I picked up this Marin bike for $8 per hour. The brakes were a bit loose and the handlebars needed straightening (I got a few odd looks doing that), but hey – $8 per hour! Bargainous.

The journey to Golden Gate Park is easy thanks to a long cycle path that covers most of it, and heading across the bridge to Sausalito is a really easy ride – if you've ever ridden for more than an hour or so there are no hills that'll trouble you, and there are several lovely views. It surely beats the alternatives:

.. and even if you have no intention of crossing the bridge it's far quicker to ride to Golden Gate Park than to walk. Having left San Francisco rather late at 3pm I caught one of the last ferries of the day back across around the bay around two hours later to return the bike before its 7pm deadline, but if you set out in the morning you could explore far further around the headland and back.

Do go across the Golden Gate Bridge

There is, as you may have heard, a lot of fog in San Francisco. Quite often this completely obscures the Golden Gate Bridge – here's the view from around ten minutes before I crossed it:

And yet when on the bridge: sunshine!

The fog was still there of course, being whipped around the towers by the wind:

.. and it was pretty chilly, but the views were fantastic nonetheless. There's a scenic view point on the far side – if you cross on the West side of the bridge there's a path underneath (with steps – you'll need to be able to carry a bike comfortably to use it). In summer I'd recommend attempting to cross even if the fog does look a bit grim – just take suitable clothes for cold/wet weather.

Skirt around the tourist traps..

Fisherman's Wharf is, at dusk, kindof pretty:

.. and great for fans of illuminated signage:

By day, though, it's a bit of a dump – aside from the bike rental shops and a branch of In-N-Out burger there's not much that I'd want to see again, with piers dominated by craptastic novelty shops (including one selling pseudo-spiritual tat called "Enlightenment" – my irony gland committed suicide on the spot).

Similarly, here's Haight / Ashbury:

Yes, the corner is now what must surely be the world's most-photographed Ben & Jerry's. The only thing I'd recommend around there is a branch of KidRobot on Haight.

.. but do cross to Alcatraz

Besides crossing the bridge, the one really touristy thing I would recommend is visiting Alcatraz. I wasn't too interested in the idea of visiting the prison (reason 1: it's a prison, reason 2: it uses the dreaded audio tours) but bought a ticket because I thought the island and ferry crossing might be pretty.

As it turns out I was right on the pretty bit and wrong on the prison. You can cross every half-hour or so on one of these:

from which you get a great view of the island (notice how sunny it was by the time we were arriving – that's not Photoshop):

and then you get as much time as you like to explore the island, which is now mostly a bird sanctuary, and the surprisingly small prison block:

Even the audio tour, narrated by a number of ex-guards and convicts, is interesting, and I was intrigued by the many signs of the Indian Occupation, about which I knew pretty much nothing at all:

All in all, I'd thoroughly recommend it. Book in advance, though – the day I crossed most of the boats were filled up.

.. and do see the Museums

On Sunday I had only a few hours before heading for the airport, so I visited the museums around Market Street. If you're interested in photography, and documantary photography in particular, SFMOMA is unmissable. It also had some later Roy Lichtenstein works on show, and a rather lovely atrium:

Around the corner the Museum of Cartoon Art is also brilliant – when I visited it was dominated by an exhibition on Beetle Bailey (meh), but also included the original copies of the first Japanese Batman comic (bonus fact: in Japanese, Batman likes to use the expression われわれ! quite a bit, just like Kyon) and an amazing collection of feature strips from the golden era of newspaper cartoons – including an original Peanuts strip in its huge A3 original format. There's also a section dedicated to small press comics and a great bookshop – this, together with my visit to Isotope, turned out to be rather expensive for me.

Also interesting was the San Francisco Fire Department Museum, which is chock full of old hand- and steam-powered engines, photos and bits and bobs. Here's the front of one of the oldest engines there:

Pop in, gawk at the stuff, make a donation. It's worth the trip, and the Swedenborgian Church is just a few blocks away.

Eat at In-N-Out

This is an In-N-Out Double Double meal. Costs about £4:

Depressingly, its is better than any burger you'll find anywhere in the UK. Ever. And here's the secret menu. You're welcome.

Don't queue for the cable cars

Three of the old cable car routes are still running, more as a tourist attraction than any kind of useful public transport (for those see the BART and MUNI services, which are comprehensive). With only three lines there are a handful of terminus stations, and each one normally has a massive queue. It's certainly worth riding the cable car at least once – if you're standing on the side there's a great view:

.. but I found that jumping on at one of the many intermediary stops meant far less waiting around – just pick one a few stops into the line so somebody will have left the car to make room for you. Tickets are $5 a ride.

Drink the local beer

California is home to some great beers – Sierra Nevada, for example – and San Francisco has its own in the shape of Anchor Steam. Both are fantastic and available everywhere, and there are some other, smaller brews too (I quite liked Fat Tyre). If you like beer, it's a great place to sample loads. Apparently the Anchor Steam brewery runs tours, but these must be booked ages in advance. Also, if you're under, say, 35, then be sure to carry ID.

And finally, go visit

And that's about it. I brought my heart back to London, arteries slightly fuzzier than before thanks to the Double Double, but San Francisco certainly is a great place, and a far better city to explore on foot than, say, San Diego. If you're on a longer trip or tight budget you can see a few great parts of San Francisco in a few days, but a week would give you time to look around properly.

While waiting for the film to start yesterday we had a rifle through the south bank book market outside the NFT, and I came across this. It's from early 1953 and contains one of Philip K Dick's earliest published short stories – it's listed seventh in my rather battered copy of Beyond Lies the Wub, which is a must-buy if you like his stuff. The cover art is by Ed Emshwiller.

The story (or 'novelet', as it's billed)  includes three black-and-white illustrations, also by Emshwiller, which you can see scanned nicely in this Project Gutenberg edition (HTML). It's a classic cold war science fiction piece in which humanity has retreated underground while robots fight on their behalf up above, and was used as the basis for his novel The Penultimate Truth.

(Massive spoiler warning here – if you haven't yet read the story, please do so!)

I first read this story in maybe 1993 – in fact, I tore through the entire anthology, and then the next three volumes. I still have the books, although they're now so faded that it took a while to find them this morning. I can remember enjoying the clever twists in so many of these early tales, including The Defenders, but what leaps out reading them over 15 years (plus most of high school, a degree and a few jobs) later is the political context.

The story was published in the middle of the McCarthy Senate Committee era, and yet portrays a conclusion to the cold war (it's not even thinly disguised – one side is American, the other Russian, both have spheres of influence in Europe) in which, having nuked the hell out of one another, soldiers from the US and USSR are convinced that it's in their best interest to set aside weapons and differences and work together:

The Russians waited while the Americans made up their minds.

"I see what the leadys mean about diplomacy becoming outmoded," Franks said at last. "People who work together don't need diplomats. They solve their problems on the operational level instead of at a conference table."

The leady led them toward the ship. "It is the goal of history, unifying the world. From family to tribe to city-state to nation to hemisphere, the direction has been toward unification. Now the hemispheres will be joined and—"

Taylor stopped listening and glanced back at the location of the Tube. Mary was undersurface there. He hated to leave her, even though he couldn't see her again until the Tube was unsealed. But then he shrugged and followed the others.

If this tiny amalgam of former enemies was a good example, it wouldn't be too long before he and Mary and the rest of humanity would be living on the surface like rational human beings instead of blindly hating moles.

"It has taken thousands of generations to achieve," the A-class leady concluded. "Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction. But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the beginning of a new stage of history."

"The conquest of space," breathed Colonel Borodoy.

"The meaning of life," Moss added.

"Eliminating hunger and poverty," said Taylor.

The leady opened the door of the ship. "All that and more. How much more? We cannot foresee it any more than the first men who formed a tribe could foresee this day. But it will be unimaginably great."

The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home.

I think I'm going to have to go back and do some re-reading of his other stories – who knows what I've missed.

I've experimented with merging multiple photo exposures together a few times now. Four years or so ago I managed to cobble two photos from a Pentax *ist DL together with the help of a lot of layer masking, and the result was okayish. In 2007, and armed with a copy of Photoshop CS3, I managed to bodge two handheld shots of the Eiffel Tower together into this:

.. which I still quite like, despite it being rather rough around the edges. This weekend, though, I've been testing Photoshop CS5, which includes an improved "Merge to HDR Pro" tool that can attempt to automatically remove some of the blurring caused by objects that move between exposures. And so armed with that, a tripod and a camera body that can auto-bracket exposures, I gave it another shot.

First I tried the docklands. Between getting harassed by a Barclays security guard and rained on a bit I did manage to get one shot of the dome:

.. and this shot of one of the docks, which came out fairly well:

But with next to no wind nothing served to test the ghost removal. And so to the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge, where it was blowing a gale and raining on and off. First I tried this postcardy shot:

.. and, as it turns out, the ghost removal worked a charm: without it this image contains three planes (top left) and a blur under the bridge where the boat was moving, but with the ghost removal option ticked both are sharp. For something a bit harder I tried some trees – these were blowing in a wind that was strong enough to smack me around the face with the camera strap:

Again, the tool did a fantastic job here – the trees are a tiny bit messy, but so much better than the green-blur-covered original. All in all, I was thoroughly impressed – getting a sharp HDR merge has gone from a task that takes a few hours to a matter of minutes on a fast computer. And although some HDRs can look really, really naff, I did get a shots that I quite like, including this:

And an elephant:

And a ruined church:

.. so the results don't have to be too lurid. All things considered I can't see myself using this technique that often, but for the occasional shot of buildings when there's a suitable wall or tripod available it could be a nice way to get a more complete image.

One of the great things about working on a computing magazine is access to a lab full of all sorts of geeky stuff – including a microscope. This belonged to PCW Magazine, may she rest in peace, but on Wednesday Anthony managed to get it working again, and so during lunch we rigged up a camera to take some photos. Here's the ball on the end of a .5mm Bic Cristal biro:

.. and the embossed letters on my (surprisingly spangly) credit card:

.. and the end of a pin on an Athlon CPU, which as it turns out is made of two metals:

We also managed to shoot some video. Here's the minute hand of my watch, ticking along 1/2600th of a revolution every second:

It's quite impressive. The camera setup we have is somewhat jury-rigged at the moment (picture here) but I'm hoping to find a proper camera adapter – Nikon used to make Coolpix camera mounts for this SMZ800 microscope. In the meantime, more pictures of stuff up close can be found here.

2010 is, we're told, the year of 3D television, so February 2010 was the month where I travelled to Vienna to see some of the new sets they'll be selling very soon. These are actually quite impressive, with the two caveats that they'll cost a fortune (in the region of £1500-2000) and there's very little to watch on them right now. And, obviously, the effect is somewhat better when you stack nine humongous sets on top of one another, like so:

But with that all dealt with I had three hours or so to see Vienna itself. Fortunately we were put up right in the middle of the city, at the rather posh Do and Co hotel, so I was able to stroll in a kind of circle around the town centre without wasting any time getting there in the first place.

The centre is dominated by the cathedral – huge, covered in scaffolding and with a remarkable roof that appears to have been made out of coloured Lego bricks. Past that, there are the usual shopping streets, stuffed full of horrible Mozart-themed tat shops and guarded by giant bears:

.. but then a block or so further and you hit the rather grand architecture. Incredibly grand buildings are to Vienna as fried chicken shops are to South London – one around every corner, and soon blending into one despite having actually quite different facades.

In fact, there are so many staggering bits of old architecture that people don't really seem to care – somebody was so nonplussed by this building and the statue in front of it that they saw fit to dump a huge ugly industrial generator there.

Note also the piles of snow: it was bitterly cold. Freezing slowly to death I headed further to Parliament and the Museums Quarter, which includes several apparently excellent art galleries placed around one square:

.. but it was cold, empty and desolate, and most of the galleries in the modern art museum were closed for rehanging. Not quite what I was hoping for.

Fortunately, there's one area in which Vienna can be guaranteed to excel: coffee and cake. Three of us took a trip to Café Central, apparently a favourite of Leon Trotsky, and stuffed down some of this:

And then it was time for the rush back to the airport, full of caffeine and cream, and a long time spent circling about London waiting for a landing slot at Heathrow. All in all, an interesting place – but if I ever go back I'll try to do so in summer and with time to check out the palaces properly. More photos here.

Too cold to run this weekend, so I took a walk up to Greenwich Park instead. The paths were treacherous, but the rose garden was pretty – a few flowers had survived, and a robin even popped in to complete the scene.

On a happier note, I've now finished testing Panasonic's DMC-GF1 – both written and video reviews will be online shortly. Will pop links up here, but in the meantime, here's Ralph taking a good look at the 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens.

Edit – video review is online here.

The Brunnen der Internationalen Freundschaft, photographed in 2006. Last time I went back this area was being redeveloped; not sure if the fountain survived.

Dropped into the Design Museum today for the Javier Mariscal exhibition. It's well worth seeing, with a good range of his work from sketches through to corporate identities and even a temple (!) built from his parts of his plastic shelving design. A couple of photos are on Flickr here. Mariscal is also conducting a performance at the BFI in November – details here.

Also on show is a retrospective of designs by the late Jan Kaplický, the architect of the bubble at Lord's Cricket Ground and the new Selfridges in Birmingham. Some of the models are baffling, and many look wildly unfeasible, but this model for a huge tower block is quite striking:

This photo only captures a small part of the building, which is strangely reminiscent of cold war television towers or the giant Arcology buildings you could construct in Sim City games. It alone is worth a visit. As the first floor of the museum is currently closed, admission to both costs just £6.