Far and away my favorite gallery was SFMOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It's the red-roofed building at bottom right with a circular skylight. Seen here from Buena Vista Gardens.

Here's that skylight from below. You have to cross the mesh walkway to get to the last wing of exhibits. After the Walker Evans photographs and the 20th century show drawn from the museum's collection it definitely seems worth it, but don't look down.

They don't let you take photos in SFMOMA, but I did notice that a critic of the Mick Parry school had visited the toilets before me.

Another day, another museum. On the headland between the bay and the ocean sits the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a very elegant neo-classical pile. 

It takes the whole of a serious courtyard to hold a statue this good.

The Palace holds what's probably the biggest collection of Rodin's work outside Paris.

It also has the best general collection I saw in San Francisco. This one's for Mick, a 19th century painting of a pretty peasant girl by Bourgereau (who tried to stop that ugly Eiffel Tower being built).

Her sad aspect is explained by the metaphoric broken jug at bottom right, which is the closest they were allowed to portraying sex in non-classical settings.

San Francisco is full of commercial galleries where you think "that's good, it looks like a Joan Miro". Then you realise that it is, and the one next to it's a Picasso.

This photo is "Identity Cyborg" by Lynn Hersham. I nearly bought it, but just snapped it instead. [My colour correction for tungsten light wasn't perfect.]

The Bay Bridge, from the Embarcadero. Or some of it -- it's very long, and there's an artificial island in the middle.

Yes, somebody was mad enough to walk a couple of miles up US101 to make sure they got all the angles on that bridge. US101 is kinda steep at this point, and not especially pleasing to the eye.

But it gets better near the end. After a while you can tell the Golden Gate Bridge is painted "International Orange".

And it's lovely when it stops. And at last you arrive...

...at San Francisco's favourite suicide spot.

The bridge never entirely made it out of the mist while I was there.

City Hall? How interesting can City Hall be? Who'd want to see that?

I have to say I was impressed.

Not a bad hallway...

...or ceiling.

Thousands of San Franciscans get married in City Hall and then have their wedding photos taken on this staircase, e.g. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

You could do worse.

My third favourite building in San Francisco, somewhere in the financial district.

A typical sort of street in the outer suburbs.

The Beuna Vista Gardens, in the middle of a cluster of museums and galleries and a sodding great multiplex cinema. Unfortunately the Ansel Adams Center For Photography was closed for relocation.

But the waterfall's nice.

A cable car...

...and why they once needed them (they're just for tourists now). This town is not flat.

However far you go, there's always a Virgin Megastore. Like it or not.

Here's Alcatraz. The queue put me off.

The sealions are Fisherman's Wharf's chief redeeming feature. They smell pretty bad, but they're good fun.

Who can guess what this is?

If Fisherman's Wharf is a cheap tacky tourist trap, then Union Square is a manicured expensive tourist trap.

This is about all that Haight-Ashbury amounts to these days, apart from some decent record and clothes shops.

OK, let's try and do art photography then.

Obligatory on trips to America, I believe.

My one rainy morning. Cue the maritime museum.

Well, I was mostly using low-contrast portrait film meant for wedding photography to get some shadow detail (Fuji NPH400).

On the way out we flew over Greenland. Notice the frozen river turning to water near top right. Too much haze from 35,000 feet, I'm afraid, and they refused to stop the plane directly above it so I could get my camera out.

At the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, I wandered out the back to see what I could find.

Leaving the Palace I hopped a bus to head for the Pacific...

...where the first thing I found was the burnt-out remains of the Sutro Baths.

South around the headland I got my first sight of Ocean Beach.

So I walked along it, and got my feet wet in the Pacific.

These two kids have just found a Susan B Anthony dollar coin in the surf a couple of yards below high water. No kidding.

From the Golden Gate Bridge, you can hardly make out the Transamerica Building unless you know where it is.

But from a pier on the far side of the city, you start to see the spike...

...and it gets bigger as you walk off the pier onto the Embarcadero (which was once an elevated freeway, but looks much better since the 1995 earthquake).

But to really see it, you have to wander into the financial district, catching glimpses as you go, until suddenly...

...it's across the street, so big you can only catch the top.

And when you finally get under it, the perspective is so close that it's hard to tell that it comes to a point anymore.