With financial institutions and other temples of commerce flagging since the pandemic, business consultant and hobby photographer Eugène Resh, 50, quit San Francisco in 2023 to roam the world. The city had been his home for decades — even though he was born in Minsk, Belarus, and his dad is Russian.

He didn’t feel pushed out. “I don’t want to work full time anyway,” he says. These days, when he’s back in the Bay Area from Phuket, Thailand (where he recently put down new roots), this self-proclaimed nomad loves pointing his lens — now often attached to drones — at the familiar spots he once knew.

“I like to use a Sony Alpha 9 camera, and I was totally against drone photography at first,” he admits. “When it’s windy and gusty, you can’t always bring the drone back. I’ve lost three already.”

Still, the pull to see the city from above and chase those abstract patterns? Too strong to ignore.

“We’ve got hills and high-rises. It was always my dream to look down on the Pyramid,” he says. And he made it happen. On a recent visit, he didn’t just capture that — he also spotted aberrant grids in the hills, geometric shipyards at Hunters Point, sea traffic on the Bay, and wide, flat expanses out in the avenues where a Russian Orthodox cathedral rises up, seemingly as high as the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco. From high above the Apple Campus in Silicon Valley, he snapped cars on the roadway nearby — a detail that shows just how massive its circular building really is.

“I treat photography like a job now,” Resh says. “Yeah, I can shoot with an iPhone — but a camera on the street and a drone in the air? Essential.”