about town is an online scrapbook of photographs taken around the San Francisco Bay Area by Lori Hylan-Cho and Al Cho.

The color photographs were taken with a Canon 10-D, an Olympus 3030-Zoom, or a Fujifilm Finepix F30; the black and white photographs were taken with a disposable film camera (either Konica or Kodak), a Minolta x700, or a Nikon F90X.

All photographs are copyright/© Lori Hylan-Cho; if you'd like to use any of the photographs for any reason, commercial, non-commercial, or personal, please contact me via FlickrMail or by sending e-mail to about_town at avocado 8 dot com.

The history of about town is as follows:

original mission ~ 09.30.00 ~ One of my favorite weekend activities is just to walk around town, occasionally taking photographs along the way. Now that I have a digital camera (instant gratification!), I find I'm taking photos *all the time*. The question is: what should I do with them?

I realized last weekend that as I took each photo, I thought of it not as a picture of a band, or a dog, or a flower, but rather as a picture of a location at a particular moment in time. I'd make mental notes like "Haight and Broderick," and "Sidewalk in front of Buena Vista Park." I also realized that this wasn't a particularly new phenomenon; I have scrapbooks full of random photographs labeled "9th and Harrison," "5th and Market," and so on.

So I decided to create an online scapbook: one of photographs taken as I walk about town. Hopefully, they give a little flavor of what my town—San Francisco—is all about.

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expanded mission ~ 08.31.01 ~ I just realized recently that it's probably time that I broadened the definition of "about town". I've been taking pictures of towns around the Bay Area for a while now, so the de facto definition of "about town" has long been "about the Bay Area" rather than "about San Francisco". Two things have happened in the past 9 months, however, that have brought me to the point where "about town" needs to be expanded even further: (1) I bought a house in Truckee (a town in the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 40 miles west of Reno) in January, and (2) I gave up my apartment in San Francisco in favor of spending my Bay Area time at my boyfriend's house in Mountain View, on the Peninsula. So now I have a large collection of photos taken north and east of the Bay Area as well as on the southern Peninsula that have been languishing on my hard drive because I haven't had a place to put them.

So from now on, "about town" will be giving a flavor of all the regions I pass through in my daily excursions throughout Northern California. I'll continue to group the photos by neighborhood and/or town, though I'll be more specific about which are which.

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contracted mission ~ 03.10.03 ~ My world is shrinking again. Or expanding -- depends on how you look at it. Al & I are now married, not just dating, so it was time to pick a house to be our home base. We tried maintaining two for a while, but it just didn't make sense for us. The Truckee house has now been sold, and I am officially a Mountain View, CA resident. For how long, however, I'm not sure: Al is looking for a new job, and we plan to buy a house together somewhere when we know where he'll be working (no sense moving to San Jose if he's going to be working in San Francisco, or vice versa). I miss the city, so I'm secretly crossing my fingers that San Francisco will be a practical option. We might even consider the East Bay (Berkeley or Oakland).

What does this mean for about town? Mostly that the photos will concentrate more on the Bay Area than I-80 east of Sacramento. Otherwise, there'll be little change.

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current state of affairs ~ 05.09.03 ~ Little change, ha! I've moved about town to Movable Type (hooray for categories!), and hope to be updating more frequently as we spend weekends goofing around in the Bay Area.

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addition to the about town family ~ 06.01.03 ~ I bought a new digital camera yesterday, and Al seems to be having more fun with it than I am. :) Consequently, I've added him as a blog author and will occasionally post photos taken by him (with due credit).

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about town II is born ~ 08.22.03 ~ We're moving to Philadelphia (so I'll get my city life back after all... just not in the city I thought I would). From this point forward I'll be starting a new photoblog called about town II, which will showcase photos from Philly. about town will be updated infrequently, with photos taken on visits home. <sigh> Home.

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about town moves to Flickr ~ 11.06.06 ~ All of the about town photos have been moved to Flickr and are now available in a single photoset. The individual pages of this site will remain live for a while, but comments will no longer be accepted. To post comments, go to the photo on Flickr and comment there.