I live about 5 miles from Alviso, CA, which is a small part of San Jose that used to be a major port at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay.  It’s built on marsh lands and is technically below sea level.  After bad floods in the 1980s, most businesses  left, leaving a handful of residents.  Oddly enough some tech companies such as TiVo and Foundry still call it home.  It’s an interesting place if you ever get the chance to stop by for a few hours.  Where the bay meets the grasslands surrounding the town, the city has constructed these interesting little house facades on wooden boardwalks.  I’ve always found them quite interesting to photograph.

On Sunday I was a little bored, and since I’ve been working so much recently, I decided that I’d drive over to Alviso and take some pictures in between rain storms.  When I got out there, things just didn’t seem to be very photogenic.  There were lots of little bugs in the air.  The sky was bright and gray. The light was fairly uninteresting.  I decided to salvage what I could, and I grabbed some bracketed shots for some HDR experimentation.  I haven’t done much HDR recently, and this felt like a worthwhile time to give it a whirl.  I got the photo above, which is a result of 3 bracketed exposures processed with Lightroom 3 Beta and Photomatix Pro.  If you’d like to see some other stuff I grabbed on Sunday, head on over to my Flickr set on Alviso 2/21/2010.