"Pick up" band at Golden Gate park

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Havin' a spontaneous party in the summer

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

This is a "pick up" band—a loose musical group that seems to just coalesce, play, and then disappear. They might be 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 to a terrific jazz sax and bass guitar duet, 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. I like that 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.