I'm really excited to be back in school taking a photography class at City College of San Francisco. Our first assignment was a scavenger hunt. We were given a list of 45 things to capture that included concrete subjects, such as something in our neighborhood, as well as abstractions, such as "our greatest fear." It was an exercise for us to practice using our DSLR cameras in manual mode, which [confession] I have never done before. Now that the training wheels are off, I feel completely liberated. These are some of my favorites. 1, 2, 3, 4: Castro, San Francisco; 5, 6, 7, 8, 9: Tilden Park Botanical Gardens, Berkeley; 10, 11, 12, 13: my neighborhood, Oakland.