This is a backlog from mid December, for a trip I took with a friend to walk around Stanford. I was curious what the campus looked like, and I wanted to see Hoover Tower.
The day was dark and cloudy. It had been raining intermittently before, so it was very overcast.
I originally planned to park around downtown Palo Alto, but as soon as we drove near, I knew that was a bad idea. Instead, I found a spot in one of the nearby neighborhoods, and we took a long walk1 over to Stanford.
There’s something about street POV photos I really like, but it’s so hard to get a shot without risking blocking traffic or just dangerously stepping out into the road. Luckily, the neighborhood streets here were pretty quiet.
Overcast days are pretty difficult to capture without being moody or bland. I used to think overcast was great for lighting2, but now I really don’t like it.
I really just wanted to capture the Hoover Tower, but it was hard to find a good spot to capture from. The day was also so cold and damp, we just wanted to get out of there and find some place warm to rest.
When we finally got to the tower and tried to enter, there was a man at the entrance who asked us, “can I help you?” To which we said no since we didn’t need anything and just wanted to look around. But it turned out what he really meant was, “you need to do this if you want to be here.” And by “this” he meant we needed to take our bags off and place them in the storage space and then we could enter and look around. Neither of us wanted to part with our belongings, so we slipped out pretty quickly without any time to warm up inside.
It was pretty disappointing, and when I later double checked the visitor info, there was nothing on their site about the bags. Alas, if this is how it works, I guess I won’t be able to climb to the top.
I took a few more shots of the outside space, while I still had battery left. Then we walked backed and grabbed hot coffee on the way to my car.
It was nice to go out and explore, but I can’t say it was too successful of a day. The weather didn’t help. I want to do more stuff, but not while it’s so cold out. I’m going to try doing more things next spring, before it gets too warm for summer.
