Monthly Archives: December 2013

The other Transamerica Building

Triangular if not pyramidal.

Adjacent to the Transamerica skyscraper at the northern tip of the business district is the original Transamerica building. The craftsmanship of the artisans creating this masterpiece is everywhere to be seen.


Panasonic GX7, Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens at f/2.8.

From the web:

“The original Transamerica Building, now home of the Church of Scientology of San Francisco, stands adjacent to the Transamerica Pyramid and is a registered historical landmark and prominent feature of the Jackson Square Historic District.

Its conception dates to the era of San Francisco’s reconstruction following the Great 1906 Earthquake. It was then that businessman John Fugazi broke ground on a bank for the Italian immigrant workers of the city’s North Beach community. The triangular, two-story building opened its doors in 1909 as the Banca Popolare Operaia Italiana (Popular Italian Bank).

In 1928, fellow banker Amadeo P. Giannini purchased the building to house his new Bank of America. A decade later, Giannini extensively added to the structure, including the third story, and rededicated it as the headquarters for his Transamerica Corporation.

After acquiring the Transamerica Building, the Church of Scientology undertook the meticulous renovation of its notable architecture and historical elements, including its distinctive glazed white terra cotta tile façade. Preservation extended from the crowning balustrades to the basement, where reside the original bank vaults.”

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The triangular shape of the original building is clearly seen in this image from Google Earth.

Lightroom 5.3

Fixes a frustrating bug in OS X Mavericks.

Each major release of an operating system from Apple brings with it renewed fears that the ceaseless dumbing down of the user interface will bring with it new horrors, more disabled third party software and much time wasted on remedies. Indeed, since OS Leopard, 4 releases ago, I cannot think of any ‘enhancements’ in subsequent versions of the OS which have moved the needle on my satisfaction scale – with the possible exception of the addition of the frequently frustrating AppStore in Snow Leopard – and the loss of the excellent Rosetta emulator and additions of such primal idiocies like LaunchPad leave one scratching his head along “What were they thinking of?” lines. After breathing a sigh of relief once the ever more massive upgrade is completed and the anomalies sorted, the best one can say of recent OS X releases after the pain and wasted time required for installation is “Thank goodness nothing is broken”. For Hackintosh aficionados the problem is far greater, as every major OS release – and some minor – has brought with it massive upgrade headaches, one factor which contributed to my migration from that excellent breed to a used Mac Pro.

For most photographers Adobe is the vendor of choice for photo processing apps and their recent track record of upgrades puts even Apple’s shambolic performance to shame. Minor changes since PS CS3 have added little value, and the recent move of CS to a Cloud model means that you have to keep making monthly rent payments for the privilege of using Adobe’s PS until the undertaker comes along, or lose access to your catalog. Sure, CS6 is backward compatible for now, but would you like to bet how long that continues? Then there’s the small matter of Adobe losing a big chunk of its Photoshop code to hackers the other month, along with 10, 30, 100 or 500 million customers’ credit cards, depending which of their press releases you care to believe. Let’s at least hope that the code thieves come out with a better, cheaper product.

That said, Adobe has done an excellent job of keeping Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (which uses the same RAW decoder) current with regard to the many new cameras coming to market, and their latest LR release adds many. If you own LR, which can still mercifully be run locally from your machine with no rent payments due to keep the software active, you can continue to use LR as your catalog/point of entry application for your files, round-tripping to your locally installed CS3/4/5/6 with no rent due to Adobe. Anything later than CS2 runs on Intel Macs without Rosetta.

The only significant bug I have noted in moving to OS Mavericks is that Lightroom lost the very useful feature of showing file counts in the Metadata panel. Now, mercifully, Adobe has fixed what Apple broke by issuing LR 5.3 which restores count data, as shown below:



LR5.2 metadata in Mavericks.


LR5.3 – counts restored.

I find this data very useful for tracking my activity levels. If I find them dropping I tell myself it’s time to get up, grab a camera and get out more.


A break from Xmas shopping. Union Square SF, GX7, 17/1.8 Zuiko MFT.

Italian deli

A cornucopia.

On Columbus Avenue in North Beach, SF.

Aficionados of ‘The Godfather – Part II’ will spot the green and gold can of Genco olive oil, center left, the same brand young Vito Corleone imported to the US.

Panny GX7, Olympus 17mm/1.8.