"Pick up" band at Golden Gate park

A spontaneous party in the summer

Watching street musician play under a bridge in Golden Gate Part, San Francisco

Friends who enjoyed entertaining for free. I could hear them across the park but almost as soon as I took the picture, they packed up and dispersed.

I'm not sure why San Francisco fascinates me. Maybe it's so doggone photogenic, like this image from Golden Gate Park.

This was a "pick up" band—a loose musical group that seemed to just coalesce, play, and then disappear. They might have been friends or even professionals out for a practice, but at this captured moment, they were "playin' real good for free" (to quote the Joni Mitchell song).

I heard them from the tour bus, investigated, listened for half an hour, skipping the lunch our bus stopped for, to a terrific sax, bass, and guitar set list. And then they packed up and left.

The other thing going on here is a photographic format I'm pioneering—taking multiple single shots in an overlapped "panorama" and stitching them together in Photoshop.

The finished image seems to blend overall (the bridge, gated underpass, and spectators) but because of the fixed geometry of the camera's film plane, parts of it are disquietingly jagged when pieced together.

For more examples of my composite images, see Bent spires and stained glass windows and So... does the earth really curve like this?