Watched as the lights passed by from Jack London Square, very bright and elaborate without being ridiculous. The Sole Proprietor realizes he needs to bring camera and tripod with him after work when he returns and put it on film. Not hard to get night pictures if you use a tripod. Use some nice slow highly saturated color film like Velvia or Ektachrome 64 or 100s. Foolish. You get in a rut and forget what opportunities each season brings to the photographer who doesn't spend his life sleeping.

The Sole Proprietor is just a beginner with this photography business, but since the fun of it is in the learning, that's an advantage. No need to earn a living at it and now, with the web, no problem getting published if that's your shtick, just move it up to your site. The buildings by themselves with their lights and Christmas decorations make for interesting other world like photographs that he can use for journal banners and he needs them before he runs through his collection of San Francisco sunsets shot off the end of a BART station platform.

The Sole Proprietor usually travels pretty light, train or plane, but this time with the camera gear (if you're going to shoot the family, you bring the heavy artillery and heavy artillery is, well, heavy) and the books for the nephew and something called a CPAP (he'll talk about the CPAP one of these days) and too many changes of clothing, a laptop with the power supply, external floppy, camera cable and the rest it has all added up. He looks and feels like a tourist.

This is the beginning of five days that should be good days, restful and fun. He is sitting in the parlor car right now. The first class passengers have a parlor car with complementary soft drinks and the like, a wine tasting in the afternoon (the cheese and crackers are OK), a juggler or magician for the kids, all pretty hokey, but OK. He generally sniffs at idiots sitting at a table using a laptop, thinking it to be kind of affection, but right now he is the idiot sitting at a table working on his journal and if anyone thinks this is an affectation, they're not saying anything about it.

The train was about 45 minutes late, almost 10:00 PM before getting out of Jack London Square so perhaps the kids are all asleep. His roomette is in the car just behind the parlor car, the dining car is next and the lounge or VistaDome car, accessible to everyone, is just beyond that. They added the parlor car for first class tickets just over 3 years ago, the Sole Proprietor is told, to try to lure more first class riders. The Coast Starlight is the only route to have it. The Sole Proprietor hates to think what the tax payer is paying so that he can ride the train, but he's not sending any telegrams to his congressman. Not tonight.

The pictures were taken with the digital camera. He doesn't really know how to use it yet, but is excited about the possibilities. The quality is better than he expected. The flash card holds about 30 1280 x 960 photographs to fill and the sharpness and color seem good. He shot a couple of MW at the office that turned out fine and he would run them here, but MW don't like no pictures of her on this or any other web, thanks. The Sole Proprietor's rule is that anyone who doesn't want their picture taken doesn't get their picture taken, no arguments. Anyone who doesn't want to see their visage on his web site just says so and its gone. Of course, they have to see their picture on his site before they can tell him to can it and there's no real reason for him to mention its there.

He'll post journals for the 10th and 11th tomorrow to catch up. He's tired right now and needs some sleep.