Oldsmobile and House, Oakland, CA. 2011.

Sometimes when I’m working from home, I’ll go to a cafe and work. Today I met up with a programmer friend who also likes to work outside the house at a favorite cafe, Local123 in Berkeley. The trouble was that once we got there, there was nowhere at all to sit. This is the second time in a row that I have arrived there and had to move on. It’s a nice place and it is great for the owners that they are so busy, but it looks like I have to find somewhere else as a first-choice work spot. In any case, we headed down San Pablo Avenue to Actual Cafe in Oakland.

Actual is located in the neighborhood where I used to work and go for lunchtime photo walks. As soon as we turned off San Pablo to park, it all came back to me, and I remembered what a photographically rich area the neighborhood is. Everywhere I looked I saw a shot. It would have been very easy to get totally distracted and just go for a stroll, but I resisted the urge. Instead I just took a couple shots and headed into the cafe to get working. But I made some mental notes of things to come back for on the weekend.