Years later.

I have been photographing it for years. Always there. Always on the horizon.

But, sometimes, you have to get really close.

Snapped the other day, meandering through the Business District.

I subsequently made a large print of this for the wall and the cavernous blacks produced by the HP DesignJet 90 dye printer are simply to die (!) for. What a piece of hardware that is.

Well done, Al Gore!

Following up on his movie about the environment, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Nobel laureate Al Gore has published an interactive book named ‘Our Choice’ which can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store for $5. (Not via iBooks). It is simply superb and you would expect no less from a member of Apple’s Board of Directors. Whether you agree with the content is not the point here. This is a peek into the future of books and I recommend its purchase with great enthusiasm. The level of interactivity – photos, charts, videos, voiceovers – is beautifully done.

The application used to design and create the book was created by a couple of Apple engineers (no surprises there!) at a business aptly named Push Pop Press and the exciting part is that they hope to release a Mac desktop application which will allow anyone to emulate the technology in Gore’s book. Imagine the possibilities with photo books – clickable voice overs, pictures which enlarge and fold out when clicked, videos in ‘how to’ manuals, you name it. It should work well for both the art and technology sides of photography.

I can’t wait to get my copy, which will put the simple eBooks I have created to shame. Click ‘My Books’ at the right to see these.

Update:

Sadly Push Pop Press has been acquired by scummy Facebook and the book app will never see the light of day. Look here for more details.

Not a square, but quite lovely.

Jackson Square is a small area one block north of the Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco. It’s home to high end decorator, architect and antique businesses. It’s really only a couple of streets and alleyways, not a square, but there are many gems to be spotted there.

Jackson ‘Square’.

All of these were snapped within a minute or two.

All on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens, ISO 320.

An icon.

Go to any American bookshop, if such a thing still exists in your area, and you will find some 10% of the shelf space dedicated to what is collectively referred to as ‘Self Help’. Billions have been made from telling others how to do it, enriching the authors and publishers but must certainly not the readers. How to Make a Million, How to Sell Real Estate, How to Find a Spouse, How to Use a Computer, How to Take Pictures (good luck with that), How to Find Inner Peace, How to Beat the Stock Market (same as finding Inner Peace in my book and just as hard) and, funniest of all, How to Find Yourself.

Judging from the prevailing content at City Lights Books on Columbus Avenue, at the foot of Little Italy in San Francisco, most of their patrons are lost, because psychology, philosophy, new age stuff and so on quite dominate the store. There are lots of patrons trying to find themselves here. While I would argue that little of worth in the field of philosophy postdates the writings of the Frenchman René Descartes (the dour stoic who gave us “I think therefore I am”, Descartes was that rarest of Frenchmen, a man without passion) and the Scot David Hume (the empiricist who pronounced “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”, Hume was that rarest of Scots, a man of passion) this in no way takes away from the need for a great bookshop like City Lights.

City Lights. G1, kit lens @ 24mm, 1/640, f/4.8.

I removed the ugly overhead wires using a combination of the Content Aware Fill and Clone Stamp tools in PS CS5.

The focus here is resolutely on the left or, as the current euphemism has it, ‘progressive’. That in no way takes anything away from a fine bookshop.

So no visit to the jewel of the west coast is complete without a call at City Lights. So famous is the store that it even has its own Wikipedia entry and, around the corner, there’s a street named after one of the founders. Shades of literary France.

City Lights Books is an amazingly fun place to visit. Not only are the chances high that you will find some fascinating gem to read but just observing the patrons is pleasure enough in itself.

Group vacations.

I was reminded of a picture I took in the early seventies when snapping this yesterday:

Japanese tour group, 2011. G1, kit lens @ 18mm, 1/2550, f/3.9, ISO 320

Here’s the earlier version, from the Tower of London:

Japanese tour group, 1974. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX.

Not much changes. The same unity of focus, the same group mentality, the same adherence to instructions. Nice people, though. Had the big earthquake been in San Francisco, the headlines would be replete with tales of looting and theft. All we saw in Fukushima was peaceful cooperation, courage and decency,