Sometimes you just have to run ….

I was traipsing around the most glorious city on the left coast yesterday enjoying weather designed by Hollywood and I got to thinking. (Pardon the awful English, I’ve been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies recently). Some days it’s perfectly clear you simply cannot take a good street photograph. Yes, you still have to go out, serve your time, bang away, fail miserably, knowing it’s the penance required for days like yesterday. I have lots of days of penance. So the city owed me one. And boy, did it ever deliver.

Don’t ask me how days like this happen. All I know is that when they do you grab the opportunity with both hands, ask no questions and push the button. You cannot predict it, you cannot analyze it and it’s beyond human comprehension. It’s just how it is.

So here, without further ado, are some of yesterday’s snaps with a few words thrown in about how it all happened.

Head man.

Piece of cake this one. I saw the guy at 100 yards and just waited. I had my patented Invisibility Cloak on so he could not see me. Impossible to miss something like this and what was he going to do? Drop his load?

Silent critic.

The only thing to do here was not to laugh. I tried half a dozen variants as the cell phone guy paced this way and that, oblivious to the world. All it took was for his critic to be placed just so. Funny thing about people on their cell phones. They become blind.

Big one.

I spotted this across Mission Street. As I crossed, trying not to be taken out by crazy cyclists convinced of their primacy on the road, I squeezed off a couple from a distance just in case. As I got closer and closer the subject remained stationary – maybe nor surprisingly – until I got the framing just so for the last in the series, the brick wall providing a nice counterbalance to her heft. It’s known as ‘sneaker zoom’. You keep walking until the subject fills the view. And where exactly do you get Levis in that size?

Pecker.

Pure serendipity, this one. I liked the composition and approached, hoping something might happen. Suddenly the bird landed and the guy on the right dipped his head. Click. No second chance here.

Kick ass.

This was nothing more than a knee jerk (!) reaction. The lady had raised her leg to support her purse, searching for quarters, and the man was trying to figure out the arcana of modern San Francisco parking meters. Just raise the camera and bang. No chance for composition. No time. I lucked out. It was that kind of day.

Hat, gloves and socks.

This very dignified gent was reliving the Old World, enjoying yesterday’s technology, aka a book, and all I tried to do was preserve his dignity and calm in the gorgeous light. Not hard when your subject is engrossed. He’s got that white thing down – hat, gloves, socks.

Superman.

But sometimes, you simply have to run. San Francisco is blessed with several generations of public transit – cable cars, streetcars, trolley buses and the Muni light rail system. I had to dodge the last three as I ran hell for leather across Steuart Street, for I had spotted Superman all of 100 yards away, the lights were changing and he was heading for his car. Narrowly saving the taxpayers of the City by the Bay a multi-million dollar lawsuit as I avoided an oncoming streetcar, I beat the world and Olympic records for the 100 yard dash to get close enough. The Man of Steel gave me one backward glance before getting in the car and that’s all I needed.

Sometimes you just have to run ….

All snaps on the Panasonic G1 with the 14-45mm kit lens set at 18mm and auto-everything at ISO320.

As good as it gets.

I rarely read novels, getting all the fiction I need from the press, but a mention of the Jim Stringer – Steam Detective novels on the BBC’s Radio 4 the other day saw me getting engrossed in Andrew Martin’s novels of the life and times of a 1905 British Railways engine fireman turned detective named Jim Stringer. If you love steam and the Industrial revolution era, these are for you. Enjoying the marvelous character and landscape painting of Martin in the Yorkshire of the time, I started having flashbacks to classic Hovis bread TV advertisements I recalled seeing in England back in the 1970s.

A moment on YouTube saw all those memories flooding back and, lo and behold, there was a very recent 2008 Hovis ad which lacked none of the class and style of the originals, whose thrust was that unchanging quality would always survive. Like English Tweeds or Fortnum & Mason delicacies or Savile Row suits.

In two short minutes you see a brilliant reprise of the last 100 years’ or so history of the greatest industrial power before America’s supremacy, everything from the Titanic, the suffragettes and the war which destroyed English aristocracy, through Britain’s Finest Hour to the stirring words of Churchill and the thrilling sound of a twelve cylinder Rolls Royce Merlin in a Spitfire. The sound track drops then swells. Inspired. If that 15 second segment doesn’t do it for you nothing will. Following is VE day and England’s splendid victory in the World Cup.

Refresh the page if the video does not pop up in your browser.

There’s a glimpse of the Swinging Sixties and dolly birds, through to the far less appealing modern times of armed policemen with shields and batons and street violence, followed by a joyous shot of millennium fireworks. The ad pulls no punches. Note also how the little boy’s clothing changes over time. Throughout the piece, as he runs through history, he clutches his precious loaf of Hovis bread under one arm, until he finally arrives home.

When I was a boy in England, Hovis was distinguished from other mass made breads by the fact that it actually had nutritional value, unlike the white starched wool that passed for bread from the other major bakers. And you actually had to slice the loaf which always gave me an indecent thrill – early stirrings of the engineer’s soul. This will tickle your visual sense every much as Andrew Martin’s books will stimulate your mind.

The best of the past year.

I have selected my favorite street snaps from 2010 and posted them to my photo site.

Click the picture below to see more:

Street snaps from 2010 – click to see more.

Most were snapped on the Panasonic G1 with the 14-45 Panny kit lens or the Olympus 9-18mm MFT ultra-wide zoom. Checking the data, nearly all were taken at a full frame focal length equivalent setting of 35mm (17-18mm on the G1), reflecting more than three decades with film Leicas, during which the 35mm lens was most often to be found on my M2/3/6 bodies. One or two were taken on the iPhone 3G. Nearly all were taken in San Francisco. Such processing as there was – not much – was in Lightroom 3.

I post these collections to my semi-static photo site from time to time, but a more frequent fix can be had at my Photoblog Snap! where I posted a couple hundred snaps or so in 2010.

Enjoy!