The true smell of San Francisco is the one experienced when riding downhill on the Cable Cars: The intense, not really ill but still somewhat “getting-to-you” smell of the hot brakes and brakepads and the cable running underneath the streets. I guess once it has gotten into your nose and brain, it is just hard-coded there forever and will remind you of all the other fantastic cable car rides you have taken before – that’s at least how I have felt today after having bought my weekly Muni pass and completed my first ride during this stay in San Francisco.

The weather during the day is really fine, some take it to be the best days of summer in the Bay Area, but it really does get chilly at night, so better pack that sweater and windbreaker for the night rides on the squeaking and rumbling cable cars up- and downhill. I know that I have probably been taking the same photographs over and over again, but technology evolves, does it not?! So now with my new Eos 5D Mk III camera I don’t have to be afraid of the high ISO settings or dirt on the sensor and can make my pictures even better than last time, right? And anyway, I just picked up the “Lonely Planet Travel Photographer” book in one of the bookstores I visited and read about the essential behavioral elements a travel photographer needs to have, and one of the things (besides the: “You will always test the patient of everyone else with you”) that struck me was the comment that the travel photographer has to “see the things that are not there” to get new and stunning photographs while traveling. So perhaps that’s exactly what I am doing when trying out the still new-to-me camera that already has done thousands of photographs since I started and yet is not quite mastered by me with all the new fancy functionality. So I keep trying with these cable cars and the dusk and night scenes here in downtown SF – and there’s always the historic street cars, too. They smell a little less but rumble just as much…