Category Archives: Photographs

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 2 of 3

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

Looking back.

Continuing from part I.

Photographs:

May 1 – I’m no fan of monochrome, largely regarding it as a cop out for poor vision, but I get into the reminiscence thing in Once upon a time ….

May 13 – Everyone has a magic moment now and then and mine took place with A snap over lunch at a Mission District brew pub.

May 22 – I don’t much reminisce about my film days, but trust me, you will love Paris, 1974 because it’s all about the most beautiful city in the world.

May 28 – An earnest walk along Mission Street saw me doing a number on Papa Hemingway.

May 31 – A visit to Hayes Valley saw one of those serendipitous discoveries of a little known and utterly charming area of the City by the Bay.

June 2 – Filoli is a wonder, not least for the fact that I like to drive there on a summer’s day and imagine that, yes, I really am Blake Carrington of Dynasty fame. I even figured out what it would take to buy and privatize the place.

June 10 – Bernal Heights on the west side of San Francisco was an incredible discovery, and I started writing about it here, with a piece on the four legged world following. Given my love of dogs this was probably the most fun I had taking pictures in 2012.

Photographers:

May 17 – Paul Bock shared some of his lovely work with me and my readers.

July 5 – English photographer Martin Parr did a number on the people, ‘culture’ and food of the deep south and it’s hard to blame him, as I spent a miserable year of my life in North Carolina surrounded by people who had married their cousins. There’s every reason to believe things get even worse the further south you go.

August 20 – The 120th anniversary of Vogue brought with it some splendid photography.

August 28 – The man who took the most famous photograph in human history passed away.

Photography:

June 23 – Ever focused on being better/faster/cooler than the MacPro, my computer builder FU Steve made sure that The HP100 goes ballistic was, indeed, a reality for my Hackintosh.

June 14 – Walter Mandler was a god, and I really got into it here.

June 24 – I love musicals and what better place than to start than at the top with Lenny?

July 10 – after the usual installation hassles, I was able to confirm that Photoshop CS5 (and Lightroom 4) run at more than adequate speed on the 2012 MacBook Air, making for an excellent portable rig. The 2012 MBA delivers a great increase in speed over my previous 2010 model.

July 20 – a focus on essential hardware in the event of an all consuming fire saw me choosing the 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S as the lens to take with me.

July 29 – my infinitely upgradable Hackintosh saw the installation of Mountain Lion. Apple’s OS upgrades have never been cheaper – ML cost $20 – or less worthwhile, each conferring additional unnecessary frou frou, Mercifully, the OS remains robust and stable.

August 5 – America excelled again, placing a camera on Mars. It’s fashionable to write America off and tell everyone in earshot that the future is in China or some other hole passing for existence in the Far East. Utter rot. Last I checked MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Princeton and Penn were all in America. All are richly endowed, and the whole world continues to try to gain entry to these, the finest schools on earth.

August 13 – The exercise in serial boredom and commercial excess which is the Olympic Games was relieved by a splendidly humorous piece that only the British can do. It saw HM The Queen parachuting into the Olympic Stadium, after slipping the watchful eye of her bodyguard, none other than 007.

Columns of the year 2012 – Part 1 of 3

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

Looking back.

It’s proving a bit of a mad dash for the finish line, but come December 31, 2012 I believe that the column count here for the year will be exactly 366. One a day, though if you go to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Archives’ you will see that August and September were dry months, so I have been in catch-up mode since. This has been a healthy thing to do as all of those ‘catch-up’ pieces had been swirling about in my noggin for quite a while so I am clearing the decks, so to speak.

I rambled back through the year and highlight below a few of the most enjoyable pieces, which I divide below into the three eponymous categories in the name of this journal. Photographs – my snaps, Photographers – about other workers in the field, and Photography – technical matters.

Photographs:

January 31 – The Abduction. This extraordinary ‘found image’, in the style of Marcel Duchamp almost, is so special that I would understand were you to accuse me of staging it. But no, that’s exactly how it was, waiting to be snapped on Osgood Place in lovely Jackson Square, San Francisco. It was so evocative that I took pen to paper and wrote a short story to go with it.

March 7 – The Nikkor 500mm f/8N AI Reflex lens is possibly one of Nikon’s most abused and ill-used optics. It is special in every way and I set out to show how to get the best out of it here. I was so irritated about the ineptness of users’ comments all over the web, reflecting nothing more than poor technique, that I really went to town on this one.

March 6 – A simple snap named Pachino brought with it a flood of imagination and memories, resulting in another short story to accompany the picture.

March 13 – Alcatraz was the destination for a day trip with my boy and it’s almost impossible to make bad pictures there, though I saw many giving it a good try.

March 24 – White Birches saw me reminiscing about my time with God. Seldom have I had so much fun writing a short story.

April 6 – Six in sixty and one-twenty saw a raw fecundity of output in two minutes with a very wide lens.

April 19 – A face at the window showed the benefits of carrying a light and inexpensive zoom along for the trip.

Photographers:

Feb 13 – Donald Jean shared his gorgeous Venetian photographs with readers. Thank you Donald for your outstanding photography.

March 21 – The NYT’s Lens blog did an arresting piece on 1950s images of dirigibles.

March 28 – Englishman Martin Parr cannot be accused of good taste, doing a number pretty much on anyone he photographs, with hard flash and poses which often ridicule. But this modern imitator of Wegee is worth a look.

April 22 – Photography in Mexico was an enthralling show at SF’s MOMA.

Photography:

January 2 – Fringale. At the conclusion of 2011 I made a commitment to share my dining places with readers who might be thinking of visiting the closest thing to Paris in America, San Francisco, a city I photograph weekly. Fringale was the first such in 2012, to be followed by many others.

January 15 – My Desk laid it all bare and disclosed the less than ordered work space in my home office. It doesn’t look much better today.

January 26 – Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s luminous tribute to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and nothing better was made for the cinema in 2012.

February 7 – Legacy Nikon lenses was a real Trojan Horse. Little did I suspect that this piece would take me on a tremendous odyssey of rediscovery of old MF Nikkors which I used in my youth, borrowed from my employer, Dixons, in the UK when I was still in short trousers. I ended the year owning all of the lenses in that piece and many more.

March 11 – The Nikon D700 and Geotagging was the tale of my determination to confer competent GPS data on my Nikon snaps. It proved successful and far lower cost and better designed than Nikon’s clunky solution.

March 17 – Adding a CPU to MF Nikkor lenses – Part II was the culmination of a massive technical exercise into ‘chipping’ old Nikkors. The benefits are huge, the costs minimal.

March 26 – ACR lens profiles saw me start publishing lens profiles for all the MF Nikkors I was acquiring. These have proved popular with old lens aficionados, looking to get the best out of their lenses.

The biggest disappointment

Photographs

Transbay.

Transbay is the largest public works project in San Francisco since the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges were constructed in the Great Depression. It has been ongoing for a couple of years and will take at least a decade more to complete, culminating in a massive overground bus terminal, an underground rail terminal and half a dozen 40+ story skyscrapers. Occupying several city blocks on the east of San Francisco bounded by the business district to the north, it is heavy construction redefined.

So naturally I wanted to be a part of that.

Early in the year I approached the bureaucrats managing the project explaining that I wanted to document the people and construction at no charge, as a gift to the people of San Francisco. The City’s efforts in this direction are beyond pathetic, comprised of one very poor quality webcam placed atop an adjacent tall building. They have no official photographer and no plans to retain one. A priceless historical document will never be created owing to this short sightedness.

I was asked to submit a portfolio of my snaps of the city of San Francisco, which I did and they said they liked.

I then pushed for closure but heard nothing for months. Finally, a liaison officer (those who can, do; those who cannot do, teach; and those who can do neither, liaise) contacted me with a raft of concerns.

Q. It will cost the city money.
A. No I will do everything no charge.

Q. We think you want to make money from this.
A. No, It’s not for profit. I would like to hold an exhibition and publish a book, and the City can have all proceeds from those efforts.

Q. We will have to assign a chaperone to you when on the project which will cost us money.
A. I will pay the chaperone’s wages.

Q. We are concerned about liability if you get hurt.
A. At my cost I will have my attorney draw up a complete waiver, indemnifying the City of any costs in the event I am injured or killed.

Q. We are concerned you will not spend time on this work.
A. I will commit two days a week for the next ten years to this effort.

Q. We will need to vet your work.
A. All work will be provided to you for screening before any reproduction.

Q. How will you start?
A. I propose to hang 20 30″ x 40″ studio portraits of the hardhats on the project around the periphery of the site for all passersby to enjoy. At my cost.

Well this sort of crap went on for several months until these people finally agreed to meet and confer. My many requests to attend the meeting were not responded to and finally I got a blank rejection.

“We think your safety would be threatened” despite all the commitments and indemnities I had offered. The bottom line is that there was no benefit for these losers from retaining me and screw the people of San Francisco.

So I wrote to the Mayor of the City of San Francisco. No reply.

Then I wrote to the Congressman for the Transbay District. No reply.

Finally I wrote to my Senator. Like you expect my elected official to actually respond? How big exactly was my campaign donation?

So the idea died and with it the City has lost the opportunity to gain a priceless historical document.

Unconscionable.

Meanwhile, here are some snaps from around the periphery of the project which I took in 2011 and early 2012 while the above nonsense was going on. For obvious reasons, my interest in taking any more has fallen to zero. And as you can see, these jerks are buying Chinese pipe at the taxpayer’s expense. Like America no longer makes steel pipes?


Pipe from China.


Theodolite.


Transbay cop.


Banksy has some fun.


Crane and thieves.


Hard hat directs passerby.


Rabbit ears.


I beams.


Crane and glass.


The temporary bus terminal.


Steel inventory.


The crane at least is American.

Snapped mostly on the Panny G3 and Nikon D700.

Seafood

Photographs

Yummy!

A few from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf the other day:


Famous Fishwich.


Crab boiling.


Clam chowder.


Waiter.


At the crab store.


Maritime Store.


Fishing Boat.

All on the D700 with the 28mm f/2 MF Nikkor, except the last where I used the 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor.