Category Archives: Photographs

Embarcadero Architecture

Photographs

San Francisco at its best.

You can read more about this magnificent thoroughfare here.

I published three dozen candid snaps of the denizens of the Embarcadero area on San Francisco’s east side here.

This slideshow profiles the fine architecture to be found along this splendid thoroughfare, with three favorite Nikkor lenses – the 180/2.8 AF-D, the 80-200 f/4.5 zoom and the 200/4 pre-Ai – heavily featured. All wonderful, especially the 200/4.

You can view my favorite three dozen architecture images by clicking the picture below:


Click the image for the slideshow.

Embarcadero Candids

Photographs

San Francisco at its best.

For the best part of the decade ending in 2016 I lived in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco. Once a week I would take the CalTrain to the city, methodically covering every district with two goals: capturing the wonderful architecture of this most picturesque of cities and taking candid snaps of the people who call the city home.

This journal entry addresses the latter and, when looking at the data in my Lightroom catalog, I find that two locations have the largest number of images – the Embarcadero and the Mission District.

The Embarcadero is the eastern most thoroughfare of the city, running past the sports stadium, the Oakland Bay Bridge (now shamefully repaired using Chinese steel) and the Ferry Building, landmarks all. Unsurprisingly these feature heavily in my images.

You can read more about this magnificent thoroughfare here.

Equipment data are included in the slideshow. Where lens information is missing for the Panasonic G1 it was the 14-45mm kit zoom. Where the lens is shown as ‘0mm’ that means I was using the magnificent 500mm Mirror Nikkor before I had added a CPU to record EXIF data. Cameras used include the Panasonic G1 MFT, the Nikon D2x APS-C and the Nikon D700 and D3x full frame bodies.

You can view my favorite three dozen images by clicking the picture below:


Click the image for the slideshow.

For images of Embarcadero architecture click here.

Tracking Charnier

Movies, Photographs

The French Connection.

This post contains spoilers regarding the conclusion of the movie The French Connection II so if you have not seen the movie and it’s on your list, quit now.

The original The French Connection was released in 1971 and was directed by William Friedkin. Famous for its car chase under the elevated subway, it’s a far lighter movie than its 1975 successor, directed by John Frankenheimer. Both movies address the smuggling of heroin through the French port of Marseille and the sequel has some truly horrifying footage of a heroin addicted Gene Hackman nearly dying from his captors’ ministrations.

Suffice it to say that the last ten seconds of the second movie are some of the most dramatic on film, culminating in the death of the drug kingpin Alain Charnier, splendidly acted in both movies by the distinguished Spanish actor Fernando Rey.


Montpellier to Marseille.

My son Winston spent an extended sojourn in France during the first half of the year, extending his French studies with a tour of Europe, centered in the beautiful ancient town of Montpellier, some 70 miles west of Marseille on the Mediterranean Sea, and he came up with the idea of finding the exact location from which Hackman fires the deadly shots at the evil Charnier. He did this using his memory of the documentary style ending, no GPS involved, but his image of the shooter’s location comes with GPS data courtesy of the iPhone he used. This is from the shooter’s viewpoint, though Charnier’s luxury yacht is missing:


Winston’s image of Charnier’s location.

And here are the exact coordinates:


The site of the climactic closing seconds of the movie.

Tremendous fun and encomiums to Winston for his diligent tracing of a great movie location.


Hackman, as ‘Popeye Doyle’, fires the killing shots.