Honoring those who served.
Click the picture to download the slideshow.
Snapped at the Golden Gate National Cemetery two days ago on Memorial Day.
The download takes a couple of minutes with broadband connections. All snapped on the D700 with 80-200mm, 300mm and 500mm Reflex Nikkors, with a monopod on a very windy day. The cemetery is located in San Bruno and includes fifteen Medal of Honor recipients among those interred.
Clarion Alley, SF.
V is for Vent.
T Rex.
Shoes. Click the picture for the map.
Uh huh.
What I know is what I owe.
Migrants’ plight.
All snapped on the 24mm Nikkor MF on the D700.
Do you want to fight?
Any street snapper visiting San Francisco should avoid the tourist traps. He should forget Union Square and Fishermen’s Wharf and take the BART subway to 16th or 24th Street. He will immediately notice the stench that is Mission Street and he will be inspired by it, for it is life lived large.
The street snapper will not find Gucci or Louis Vuitton there. He will encounter a neighborhood where the predominant language is Spanish and the most common price is 99 cents. He will absorb the atmosphere and he will know it is good.
Mission Street between the 16th and 24th Streets BART stops.
All he needs is a camera with a wide lens. The sidewalks are not especially broad. Stepping into busy Mission Street is a bad idea. The wide lens will allow him to get in close. The snaps will then be devoid of clutter. The lens is small and it is also right for the many alleyways. These are rich in murals. They are steeped in history, in popular culture and in political protest.
This is not Beverly Hills. Cops patrol actively on light Noddy bikes. That does not mean he should take his safety for granted. The weak should stay away. If he cannot afford to lose his camera the snapper cannot afford to come here. He must dress down and leave the Rolex at home. This is a place for men, brave men, and they will not be found wanting.
These were snapped on 40 year old Nikon lenses. Lenses made by engineers for men and for men who know what they are about and who know how to use them. The street snapper must risk losing his gear or be prepared to fight for it. He must think like a bullfighter. The smell of fear is broadcast louder than a whore’s scent. No bullfighter ever entered a ring expecting to meet a friend. Nor did he enter it scared. He will prevail or he will die, be he bullfighter or snapper.
Mural. 24mm.
Cop Noddy bikes. 24mm.
Sun and mural. 105mm.
Cocktails. 50mm.
Usurious lenders aplenty. 50mm.
Many derelict theaters remain. The street has seen better days. 50mm.
Primary colors everywhere. 24mm.
Buddhist low rider on 17th Street. 24mm.
Clarion Alley mural. Along with Balmy Ally, off 24th Street, this is a ‘must see’ location. 24mm.
La Taqueria with pups. The finest Mexican food anywhere, at 25th Street. Click the picture. 24mm.
With apologies to Ernest Hemingway.
Flashback.
One of the greatest pictures of the American Depression is not one protraying migrant workers or starving children, moving and deeply tragic as those are. No, Walker Evans’s ‘Damaged’ is very much the iconic picture of that sad era.
It was Evans’s masterpiece that was playing in my head when I snapped the picture below. This was two days ago. It is black and white. That is in keeping with the poverty of the neighborhood. Click the picture for the Google StreetView of the jewelry store. It is stuck between a Goodwill shop and a Christian Science Reading Room. Google doubtless refreshes its StreetView snaps from time to time, but their current one was taken when the awning was enjoying better days, before our latest Depression.
During the current Depression. Ken Jewelry, 2285 Mission Street, SF. D700, 24mm lens.
Evans’s masterpiece? How could one image better tell of America’s fall from grace in the Great Depression?
During the previous Depression. Damaged, by Walker Evans, around 1930.
An update.
After spiking mightily, with prices doubling owing to the floods in Thailand which took out a sizable chunk of the world’s production facilities, Hard Disk Drive prices are coming down again. While my main Hackintosh uses Solid State Drives for the OS and applications, SSDs still remain prohibitively expensive for high volume data storage. Meanwhile, HDD technology refuses to die and just gets cheaper.
Scanning Amazon US I see 3.5″ indicative prices as follows:
Current Amazon US 1tB HDD listings.
Now there are drives and there are drives. In the various specs you will find 5400rpm, 7200rpm and 10000rpm, 3gb/s SATA II and 6gb/s SATA III, 32mb and 64mb buffers. You will also find hybrid drives with small SSD front ends and traditional high volume spinning discs doing the heavy lifting. The latter only make sense if you access the same apps (though it’s much more effective to simply buy more RAM and keep the apps loaded all the time) or recurring data frequently; otherwise, the price premium does not solve. And, unless you must have the portability afforded by 2.5″ notebook drives, these also make no sense for high volume storage at home where portability is not an issue, but price is. Further, 2.5″ notebook drives do not come in the higher capacities available in the larger 3.5″ clunkers.
Here’s my experience using a Hackintosh with a current motherboard, a machine superior in most regards to the current, and rather dated, MacPro:
If your PC or Hack’s motherboard supports 6gb/s connections – as the latest motherboards mostly do – then a 6gb/s drive for internal mounting is the best price/performance option. You get a fast, hardwired motherbard connection and no need for an external enclosure. I still use 1tB drives as the areal storage density is low so the technology is fairly remote from the ‘bleeding edge’. However, 2tB drives have been around a while now and while failure rates are slightly higher, they are more cost effective. At this time I am avoiding anything over 2tB. Most external USB enclosures support up to 2 x 2tB HDDs, but not 3tB.
For external storage eSATA is the way to go or use a USB3 external enclosure – not easy to find – which supports 6gb/s drives.
So its’s good to see that HDDs are becoming affordable once more. They remain an attractive option until SSDs start falling in price, something that is happening at a glacial pace.
Finally, for aficionados of Nikon’s latest, the D800, where file sizes can rise to 75mB, that gets you 13,000 files or so per 1tB. So the upgrade to a couple of 2tB drives should likely be part and parcel of your upgrade to a sensor few realistically need, and even fewer can fully exploit.