Stair Aye, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the spirit of Arlo Guthrie’s somewhat picaresque song Alice’s Restaurant, in which a narrative about the Vietnam-era draft ostensibly starts with a tale of taking out the trash, this story behind this image starts with a bad haircut.

The haircut, and it included a dye job, belonged to my dear wife Phyllis, and the dye job was very red. As she said, the ensemble made her look like a “big strawberry.” She went back to the salon to get them to fix it, and came back looking like a “big frosted strawberry.” Normally, one should beware of using the word “big” in the context of one’s spouse on one’s blog, but I think since the phrase was hers, and considering the entire set of circumstances, which may become clearer to my readers as time goes on, I can get away with it this once.

Anyhow, getting back to the bad-dye-and-hair-cut, she had to go into San Francisco on Friday for emergency repairs, and I was her chaffeur. To pass the time while I waited, I took photos (of course!).

This image started with the roughly spiral staircase in the San Francisco General Hospital parking structure. I photographed down the well of the staircase in cloudy but bright weather using my digital fisheye lens on tripod for maximum depth of field and area coverage (this partially explains the weird converging lines and wide area of coverage).

Back home with a definitely aesthetically enhanced wife, I played in Photoshop to extend the depth and complexity of the stairs, and added an eye of a newt at the bottom of the stair well. If only I could have used Photoshop on Phyllis’s hair, I would have saved a lot of trouble.

Related images: Resistance to Spirals is Futile; Endless Stair; Spirals (Shell and Stair).