photo essays

What if God is a Mushroom? (A magical mystery fungal photo tour)

by Sven Eberlein On a recent reunion trip to Schroon Lake in Northern New York, my friends and I took a day hike along the northern end of the lake toward Pharaoh Lake. I don’t know if it was just that time of year or if the moist post-hurricane Irene setting had anything to do with it, but within just a few hundred yards from the road we found ourselves in a sea of mushrooms, dig deeper

Pedal Power to the Music People!

by Sven Eberlein A couple of days ago the 6th annual Bicycle Music Festival, the largest 100% bicycle-powered music festival in the world, took place in San Francisco. Starting at Old Cabin Meadow in Golden Gate Park, the event then went mobile with a Live on Bike performance ride from Golden Gate Park to Potrero Hill, with the night time portion of the event happening at the Showplace Triangle at 16th & Wisconsin. I was dig deeper

How Hot Soup is Making the Planet Cooler

by Sven Eberlein For the past three months, my daily walk down the street has been seasoned by a small but quite lovely addition to the neighborhood. Whenever I’d cross the street at Valencia and 21st, a friendly, almost fairy-like voice would ring from around the corner, beckoning me with a cherubic “Hello Sir, would you like to try some soup?” While fate conspired for me to have just eaten or be on the way dig deeper

Tuber Creations relaunches

Today is the official launch of the new site!!! No matter where you stand on the state of the planet, there seems to be a consensus that things cannot go on the way they have been. We humans are creatures of habit, and some habits, like a good rhythm, are worth keeping. But there’s also a feeling in the air that something bigger and more fundamental within us has to shift, so that our daily dig deeper

No pain, no gain: On taming and tasting the nettle

by Debra Baida Changing the way we look at the world sometimes quite literally means to touch things we’ve deemed untouchable. In this delightful photo essay, Debra Baida shows how a dreaded weed unveils its magic, beauty and flavor if approached from a different angle. My literal first hand experience with nettles provided one of the most uncomfortable, if not incredibly painful, kitchen memories on record and an important lesson: never plunge your hand into dig deeper

Internet Killed the Video Store

by Sven Eberlein an ode to our local video store and why I still like going there… One of the great joys of living in my Mission neighborhood in San Francisco is that I’ve gotten to know many of the local business owners over the years. A lot of them live right around the corner from me, and it’s not unusual to bump into them while getting a coffee or a burrito, or while waiting dig deeper

How sitting in windows is making the planet cooler

by Sven Eberlein In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama made a call to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. While I understand that this is a well-intentioned challenge to his fellow American citizens to get with it in a quickly changing world economy, I can’t help but wonder whether stepping on the proverbial gas (or electric) pedal and getting busier than we already are is going to dig deeper

2010: Marveling at things small and large

by Sven Eberlein It’s the end of the year, a time when many of us piece together the perspectives gained throughout the seasonal cycle into one continuous story. This is a collage, an attempt not only at making sense of my own journey (most photos link to posts I wrote this year) but at bridging the always beckoning dichotomy of hope and despair, heart and intellect, seeking change and being at peace with what is. dig deeper

On a warm San Franciscan night...

by Sven Eberlein The last two days have been truly gorgeous in the City by the Bay. Warm, almost balmy November nights. Not completely unusual, but after a relatively cool summer and early fall, this has been an unexpected treat. Now I know that there are a lot of problems in this world and that life can be incredibly difficult at times, but there are those moments when all the heavy burdens fall away and dig deeper

Lou Dematteis: Visions of Environmental Justice

by Sven Eberlein A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of meeting Lou Dematteis, a former Reuters staff photographer who covered the wars that raged throughout Central America in the 1980s and first traveled to Ecuador’s northern Amazon region in 1993. What he found there was not a shooting war, but a war on the environment, a gut-wrenching clash between the “civilized” world’s thirst for cheap oil and indigenous people’s right to live dig deeper