Film Noir at its best.

I have been watching Howard Hawks’s ‘The Big Sleep’ (1939 – but check the Comments) for decades now and have long ago given up trying to figure out whodunit. The plot is so many layered, so vastly complex, that I prefer to luxuriate in Humphrey Bogart’s and Lauren Bacall’s acting while enjoying my favorite city in America, Los Angeles. The movie is one of the rare cases where monochrome trumps color.

San Francisco has done a far better job of preserving its inter-war buildings than either LA or New York. The atmospheric Bunker Hill of Philip Marlowe’s day has long been torn down, replaced by soulless glass and steel buildings and Frank Gehry’s execrable Disney Concert Hall, an eye sore of rare foulness. New York also gives short shrift to historical preservation as the world’s center of greed abhors space that cannot be developed and rented for top dollar. Whether it’s the lighter touch of commerce in San Francisco or the fact that the big bucks reside thirty miles south in Silicon Valley, I do not know, but the city is brimming with gorgeous buildings from the ’30s and ’40s.

This one was spotted on Howard Street and the threatening shadow suggested nothing so much as the office space that a gumshoe of Marlowe’s persuasion would have occupied. Marlowe, for ever down on his luck, would have been in one of the smaller offices on a low floor. Not for him the high rent suggested by the magnificent double height windowed floor. As is often the case, the backdrop is a modern building presumably designed by a structural engineer, because architecture is nowhere to be seen. Here it only serves to heighten the beauty of the older masterpiece, caught in a shaft of late afternoon light on a freezing winter’s day.

G3, 45-200mm @ 103mm.

Here’s one of the many posters for that cinematic masterpiece:

A more recent version of the LA ’40s crime mystery, no less well made or acted, gains from a simpler plot compared to The Big Sleep what it loses to color – L.A. Confidential.

For those preferring San Franciscan detectives, Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade is as good a stand-in for Marlowe as any.

One of my commitments for 2012 is to publish more architectural photography and, checking this blog, I see it’s a subject I have addressed on many occasions, so I have added an Architecture category. You can access this by clicking here or by diving into the drop down menu under ‘Categories – Photographs’ at the bottom of this screen.

No compromise message.

East Mission Street, SF. G3, kit lens @34mm.

Beyond impressive.

I finally corrected a major omission in my visual history of San Francisco. At last I went inside City Hall and I must say the experience was simply overwhelming. While the present 1915 structure is smaller than the original which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, its proportions are far more pleasing. The dome is one of the largest in the world and, as befits America’s most productive state, the building is taller than the Capitol in Washington DC. The floor space is some 500,000 square feet; Buckingham Palace, by comparison, is over 800,000 square feet. It looks like several marble quarries were called into service in its construction and the quality and condition of the building are breathtaking.

As befits a great democracy, access is amazingly easy. You have your bag checked and pass through an airport-style scanner and that’s it. You are free to wander wherever you want and no one hassles you if you take pictures. As luck would have it someone was having a marriage celebration during my visit, and the sound of Vivaldi lofting into the great cupola while I gazed on in awe made for a wonderful visit. I made my way up many back staircases and engaged several City employees in discussion, finding them to be invariably helpful and as thrilled to be there as was I.

All the interior snaps were made on the Panny G3 at ISO 1600 in RAW format. The G3 has two incredibly useful click-stop settings on its mode dial – C1 and C2. I have both set for aperture priority with C1 at ISO320 and C2 at 1600, making switching simplicity itself. No need to dive into fiddly LCD menus. Compared with the G1’s sensor I estimate the G3 is not one but two stops finer grained – ISO 1600 is close, as regards noise, to ISO 400 on the G1, which is pretty amazing. I switched on that auto dynamic range control in the G3’s menu (a feature not available in the G1) and it did a fine job of taming some of the extreme contrasts on what was a very sunny day, with sunlight pouring through the windows. No need to mess with multiple exposures and HDR techniques. The following snaps are mostly straight from the camera, converted from RAW to JPG in Lightroom 3.5 RC.

All snapped on the G3 with the 14-45mm kit lens at ISO 1600 (except for the exterior which was at ISO 320), all interiors at full aperture and handheld.

If you find yourself in San Francisco, take some time to visit this special building.

Other domes of western civilization worth a visit? Start at the top – Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City – Bernini’s spherical original stretched just so by a wizard, transmuting the ordinary into the magical. Brunelleschi’s Cathedral in Florence – was anything more perfect ever built? One of the great meldings of art and engineering. Then the Pantheon, I suppose, if bigness is your thing. And St. Paul’s in London, remarkable for its light airiness from a nation more given to the lugubrious in its architecture. And, frankly, it would be unfair to exclude City Hall from that short list.

Original City Hall destroyed in 1906. Note the ungainly proportions.

Almost faded away.

This lovely brick building soldiers on, dwarfed as it is by the poor later efforts of structural engineers who designed the boxes around it.

G1, kit lens @36mm, 1/100, f/5.6, ISO 320.

Located at First and Clementina Streets in San Francisco, the original tenant’s name is barely visible in the brickwork. But there’s no disguising the beauty of the brickwork or the architect’s sense of style and proportion. It’s now home to a German manufacturer of high end kitchen cabinets, doubtless made in China.