The Last Orange Tree Orchard Amongst the High Tech of Silicon Valley

The theme for the March 2009 event was Diversity. My home town is San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and this is a place that has a lot of diversity. I could have captured the people, a mixture of many nationalities that have moved to the area for work in high tech, but I chose this scene which shows the old and new silicon valley. Before the transistor was invented this area was all fruit farms and orchards. Then in the 1950's as technology developed and companies moved in it became silicon valley. This panorama shows what is possibly the last fruit tree orchard in silicon valley! His neighbours include Canon and Altera to the south, CISCO Networking headquarters to the east, a large apartment complex to the north, and Polycom to the west. It is literally just a small island of a farm inside the heart of silicon valley.

There are other signs of diversity in this picture, firstly the landscape. Most of silicon valley is very flat and at near sea level, but in the distance to the east you can see the mountains and hills that surround the valley, and if you had a very keen eye you could see a little snow on the top of some of these hills from a recent storm. Even though Silicon valley is a very developed and urban sprawl you don't need to travel far to see countryside, hills and the California coast including Santa Cruz and the famous highway 1.

Finally, this panorama shows diversity in transport options, in the same scene you have people walking, a cycle lane, roads with cars, a bus stop sign and the light rail station with the train passing through.

I hope you like my first WWP event entry, feel free to e-mail me with your comments.

USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 37° 24' 8.5" N
Long: 122° 57' 22.27" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Canon 40D, Canon 10-22mm at 10mm, Nodal Ninja 3 MKII Tripod Head, PTGui software.