Category Archives: Photographs

A stroll along the Embarcadero

Dining, Photographs

A lovely day out.

Go back a century and San Francisco’s Embarcadero had no sidewalks. Just the road, bordered to the east by dozens of wharves hiding the nasty realities of commerce from passers by.


The Embarcadero a century ago.

But the city’s leaders got wise to the benefits of crafting great promenades (doubtless they had seen Paris) and we got the Embarcadero in its modern guise, replete with vast sidewalks for biking, skating, walking the dog, and increasingly renovated wharves which now house chic restaurants and elegant offices rather than whale blubber butcheries.

This past Sunday offered an opportunity to enjoy these privileges, so I parked my ancient (fat and ugly – no theft of fear) Lexus in my Top Secret Free Parking Spot and proceeded afoot. Not wanting any more than a minimum of encumbrance, I pinched my son’s Panny LX100, that sweet little jewel with the fine Leica zoom lens, and had at it.

Red’s Java House, just south of the Bay Bridge, has been serving burgers and fries for 60 years and no they are not about to mess with success. Just don’t expect good food here, though the views from the rear patio are great.

A few yards north and the Bay Bridge crosses the Embarcadero. It’s being fixed with (faulty) Chinese steel – what is it with America? Like we have forgotten how to make structural steel?

A few yards further north you will find our ‘heroes’ polishing their nice fire engines; there are no fires so that’s all they have to do until retiring on an inflation weighted pension at age 50:

A couple of hundred yards further north and you will find that the charming, naïve, whimsical rocket which used to grace this little plaza just south of the Ferry Building has been replaced by an execrable excrescence, complete with pretentious plaque loaded with mindless blather:

The Ferry Building itself has sprouted a sign testifying to the one hundredth anniversary of its rebuilding after the 1906 great fire and quake:

Just north of the building a lone (and no less lovely for that) Ducati hangs out on what was a surprisingly uncrowded day:

Many of the old wharf buildings now house upper end, white tablecloth restaurants. Mercifully the prices keep most of the mid-West out – from whale blubber to human blubber in three generations:

They mostly pose outside in their ridiculous garb when not riding their no less asinine Harleys:

The Waterfront is especially recommended:

Humor is everywhere to be found:

Head a block west and you will find great charm in the side streets which border the ever so steep ascent to Telegraph Hill, which overlooks North Beach:

One of the enduring sources of appeal of San Francisco is that the few modern skyscrapers it contains are in the business center with all about it largely preserved. Nonetheless, now and then an inspired design comes along harking back to the days of brick and one such is the Levi Strauss building on Battery Street:

But turn the corner and you can see the real thing, complete with Edward Hopper shadows:

Al fresco dining is always fun and every ethnicity is on offer:

Today I opt for something a tad more comfortable and end up at Il Fornaio on the self same Battery Street, again mysteriously deserted:


iPhone 6 snap.

A chicken salad and a glass of Pellegrino complete the picture:


iPhone 6 snap.

Fresh, beautifully prepared, well priced at $22 and highly recommended for the excellent service.

On the way back I spot an unusual open trolley waiting for passengers on the Embarcadero:

And the gorgeous Audiffred Building is a magnet for my trigger finger:

Amazingly the building survived both the quake and ensuing fire:

All snapped on the Panasonic LX100 except where noted.

Photographs – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Photographs

Ten years and ten million readers.

I started writing here ten years ago today, ten million hits ago. When titling this journal I had three topics in mind.

‘Photographers’ would address pieces about photographers whose work I like and which in some way influenced my way of seeing. The most influential by far is Henri Cartier-Bresson whose work I first chanced upon in the public library in London, when I was 10 years old. It immediately captivated and does so to this day.

‘Photography’ would address technical aspects of the craft, including both cameras and processing hardware. At the start of the last decade the latter had come to irreversibly mean no more film or chemical darkroom, but rather a digital image and a desktop computer. And thank goodness for that. The amount of time spent on the production process has never been lower. Just download, click a couple of things in LR then push Print. Done.

But the most important of those three aspects of the image captured in the title of this journal is ‘Photographs’ and that means photographs taken by me. This journal is like a television set – if you don’t like the content, switch channels. I have dozens of large prints of my snaps on the walls here, their daily examination reminding me what an absolute blast I have taking pictures. I enjoy my ‘channel’.

My primary interest is street photography and it does not hurt that America’s most photogenic city, San Francisco, is at my doorstep. To illustrate my street work of the past decade I have selected just two rolls’ worth of ‘film’. 72 snaps. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already appeared here.

What HC-B taught me at the tender age of 10 is that good street photography is much more than just pressing the button at the right moment. Sure, you cannot produce a good image from a poorly timed snap. But the other key attributes abundantly found in HC-B’s street work are a sense of drama, enhanced by an absence of clutter. Accomplishing the latter in street snaps is one of the more challenging aspects of our crowded urban environment. Drama is not an issue. There is a lot to go around in the eternal human comedy.

The other attribute which pervades my snaps is something of which the master’s work is totally devoid. Humor. The sheer pleasure, joy and frequent hilarity the streets of a great American city bring to the eye are the sublimest of pleasures. A life without humor is no life at all.

And there’s one other variable, one about which HC-B was clueless. Color. I have little interest in monochrome snaps, which mostly say to me that the photographer was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We live, as Eliot Porter reminds us, in a world of color.

A quick peek at the bottom of this journal’s page will show how those three major categories addressed here were favored over the past decade:


10 years of snaps and writing.

If the ‘Photographers’ category is light, it’s no surprise. There are few out there of note.

The decade since the first entry here on June 15, 2005 has seen this journal bring me tremendous satisfaction, lasting friendships, the joy of both learning and teaching and a wonderful outlet for whatever was in my mind on any one of those 3,000 plus days. If there have been frustrations – resulting solely from trolls who will never contribute anything useful to civilization – then these were quickly forgotten, courtesy of the Delete key and secure in the knowledge that no negative person has ever accomplished anything of value.

I hope you enjoy the slideshow I have put together of those 72 images. Every time I gaze at these snaps I enjoy perfect recall of how each was made and remember the thrill of seeing the moment come together. What other hobby can compare?

Some were sheer automated reaction as a situation presented itself, like the bike-taxi rider (#1), the selfie couple (#9), the joyous street scene (#42), the lady with the raised knee (#64), or Superman entering his car (#65). Others were carefully premeditated, like the lone snapper below the Golden Gate Bridge (#3), the solitary, seated figure outside the CJM (#13) or the lady in the Balenciaga outfit (#54). Three were actually posed – the bell ringer (#7), the unhappy pair in The Saloon (#22) on Grant Street and the glass treader in the Castro (#32). Many were simply magic, like the little boy in the window (#34), the sack carrier (#45), the man with the finger (#47) or the child chasing the bubble (#49) – these last four being snapped in the Mission District, my favorite part of the city.

The flamenco music accompanying the slide show is by Nova Menco, full of that same joie de vivre I experience on the street. Where EXIF data is spotty that’s because the related image was made with an ancient MF Nikkor before I had added a CPU to properly record everything. The occasional hiccup in inter-slide fades is thanks to Adobe’s Lightroom 6.

To view those ‘two rolls’, click the image below. All these snaps were taken in San Francisco. The running time is six minutes, or 5 seconds a slide.

[iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/132615344″ width=”1000″ height=”563″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

For those of you who have been around for the journey, some 4,000 readers daily, I extend a hearty thanks.