Category Archives: Photographs

Street Snaps – 2010

Photographs

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!

The Hobart Building and The Galleria

Architecture

Some of the city’s finest.

There’s a reason you pay a premium to live in California. It’s more than repaid by the money saved on crashed cars, snow ploughs, medical costs from winter ills and the absence of rednecks.

I found myself in San Francisco noodling on such thoughts the other day with the weather beyond perfect. Clear skies, cool, no wind, lighting made for photography.

One of the indoor shopping malls in the city offers not one but two roof gardens, poorly advertised and known to few, yet affording fine views of the city. It’s the Galleria and you can find it here:

Crocker Galleria.

From the northern garden (the two are not connected so you have to traipse through the shopping mall to get from one to the other) you get a superb view of the Hobart Building, built in 1914 and still putting all around it to shame. Click on that landlord’s link and you too will conclude they should have retained me to take the picture of their building, for theirs could scarcely be worse:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 11mm, perspective corrected in PS

Look down and you get a splendid panorama of that great thoroughfare that is Market Street with Post Street in the foreground:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 9mm, distortion correction in LR3

Look the other way and you get a shyster broker and some splendid colors and shadows on Montgomery Street:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 12mm

The southern roof garden of the Galleria offers a symphony of shapes, reflections and design:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 15mm

The view through the Galleria’s glass roof is no less inspiring:

G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 10mm. Lens profile correction applied in LR3.

The Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens on the Panasonic G1 is perfect for this sort of thing and you can see what I wrote about it by clicking here. Creating your own lens profiles for distortion correction on the G1 and its brethren was addressed here.

If there are better ways of spending a sunny day in a great city they may be found in Paris or Rome or Venice or Florence, but this is pretty close to as good as it gets. New York? Fughedaboutit.

Goodbye Kodachrome, hullo freedom.

Photographers, Photographs, Photography

Bitter sweet feelings.

Kodachrome was the first and last color slide film I used, before migrating to color negative when emulsions equalled and exceeded Kodachrome for quality and contrast range. Then along came digital and film was no more.

Kodak gave its last roll of Kodachrome to National Geographic snapper Steve McCurry and his last picture on the last roll was of the Parsons, Kansas cemetery, the town with the last Kodachrome processing lab. So even if you can find some Kodachrome, you can no longer get it processed.

The last snap on the last roll. Parsons, Kansas.

Click the picture for the NPR article.

It is not this journal’s goal to indulge in political discussion. However, when the hydra of politics begins to threaten our most basic freedoms, it is important to draw attention to the reality. In England, for example, a nation increasingly resembling a police state, just try pointing your camera at something when a cop is present. In France, woe betide you if you wear a rag on your head. As goes Europe, so goes America. How long before our first photographer is incarcerated as a ‘threat’ to national security?

But not all was bad with the year just ending. Most significantly, we have seen the stirrings of global free speech through the courageous acts of an Australian journalist whose WikiLeaks publication has started exposing all governments for the frauds and cheats they are. Those seeking proof need look no further than the outpourings of vituperation and threat from those very governments so clearly exposed. If you were an unelected apparatchik of a government which afforded you easy money for no work, you too would consider your job mightily threatened by this sort of thing and that is what we are seeing in the press today.

So for all of you believing that the First Amendment to the US Constitution is a Good Thing in need of daily defense and support, all of you tired of perpetual war, all of you disgusted with a world ruled by banksters and corrupt oil men and purchased politicians and morally bankrupt diplomats and warmongers and despots and torturers, wrapping themselves in the flag, caring nothing about the next generation, let me take a moment to remind you of the words of that great piece of US constitutional prose:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I fondly hope that all global hegemonies are mightily exposed by what is happening in the world of disclosure and look forward, perhaps naïvely, to a better future.

So Kodachrome, thanks for a great past and Mr. WikiLeaks, thank you for a promising future. We can but hope that US gaols remain free of photographers.

For an earlier version of this brave journalist, one who worked before the invention of cameras, click here.

And you can read all about Kodachrome here

High tech Hockney

Paintings

Art and technology.

Painter and photographer David Hockney has migrated from a paint brush and camera to an iPhone and iPad to create new works of art.

He creates images on his iPad and sends them to friends. The app he uses is named Brushes – click the picture below for more:

As this fascinating article from NPR relates, Hockney is so intense when using the iPad and Brushes that he occasionally wipes his finger on his smock, forgettting that he is not using a real brush loaded with paint!

Most intriguingly, his current Paris show is displayed on iPads to any of which he can simply send a new image when he feels like it – a dynamic, ever changing exhibit which will make multiple visits worthwhile and is surely the right way to display photographs in the modern age. I wrote of this concept over four years ago suggesting that ever cheaper LCD televisions would be the display ‘canvas’ of the future. LCD displays have halved in cost since I wrote that earlier piece. though it seems like the iPad beat the TV to the punch in Hockney’s capable hands.

Were I a photo gallery curator, I would chuck out all the frames, fire the framers and printers and museum guards, buy 50 iPads and 50 big screen TVs and advertise “See our latest show – no two days alike. Come as often as you like with a show pass allowing any number of visits for just 50% more than the regular price. See photographs in their true splendor and dynamic range.”. Result? Costs halved, revenues up 50%. Gallery saved at a non-recurring cost of $60k. Further, sell each show as a download at the conclusion of the exhibit and really clean up. Oh! yeah, and sell all those dumb ass prints to collectors to pay for the hardware and severance costs.

There are still those who maintain that the iPad is a device purely for consumption. Disregard these luddites.

Market Street

Architecture, Photography

1906 before the ‘quake.

The remarkable movie of a tram ride down Market Street in San Francisco, made in 1906 just before every building shown was destroyed by that year’s earthquake, is something I chanced on using the new ’60 Minutes’ iPad app. You don’t need that – you can see it on your computer by clicking the image below:

Market Street, 1906. Click the picture for the video.

The original was shipped east just one day before the earthquake and is not just history but tremendous fun. It ends at the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building, (seen above), splendidly restored today. More here.