Category Archives: Photographs

The embrace

About the Snap, Paintings

Edvard Munch lives!

The embrace

Date: Feb 6, 2011
Place: The Embarcadero, San Francisco
Modus operandi: On the BikeCam.
Weather: Just perfect.
Time: 2:07pm.
Gear: Panasonic G1, kit lens at 28mm, f/5.6, 1/160th, ISO320
Medium: Digital
Me: Seeing Edvard Munch
My age: 59

While the gender rôles may be reversed, Edvard Munch saw the same vampiric behavior in the enamored lover in his painting Vampire (1893) and I confess that was my sole thought when pressing the button:

Edvard Munch – Vampire – 1893.

UCSF Mission Bay

Architecture

An architectural nightmare.

The architecture of a university campus seems to bear little relationship to its academic excellence. The raft of Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine at UCSF Mission Bay in south east San Francisco would appear to confirm that a welcoming environment and academic excellence are unrelated. Visit this soulless campus and you would swear that, even at lunch hour, the place has been hit by a neutron bomb. The public areas, such as they are, will be empty, the buildings remain standing. The ‘quad’, if you can call it that, is dominated by two fifty foot slabs of steel plate covered with graffiti and rust …. see the third snap below.

And it’s not as if the near constant construction at this huge campus is improving things. Whereas you can see some hint of originality in the brutality of London’s Barbican or the sheer silliness of Paris’s Pompideau Museum, their is neither wit, whimsy or originality in the structural steel passing for architecture at UCSF Mission Bay.

UCSF, Mission Bay.

Try as I may to inject some wit and interest into snaps of this architecturally arid desert, I fear I am doomed to fail. I don’t see myself revisiting this area any time soon unless, that is, I get a sudden hankering for a Nobel Prize in physiology, which is a long shot.


What were they thinking of here?

The reflections say more than this building ever will.

Slabs of rusty steel ….

Little sign of life.

A rare human being.

No, I am not making this up.

“Ugh!”, in a word.

How desperate a place is this to take your child?

This one must be the campus gaol.

Deserted. As usual.

All snapped over the past two years on the Panny G1 with the kit and 45-200mm MFT lenses.

The dog trainer

Photographs

Pure joy.

Coming from one who has never met a dog he does not like, what follows is a highly biased account.

I was pedaling around the bay, in the area of that soulless ball park which AT&T has foisted on the long suffering inhabitants of San Francisco, when my eye was caught by a flurry of activity on the east side of the stadium. Taking advantage of the BikeCam I was there seconds later, chatting with this man surrounded by some twenty dogs.

“What’s with all the dogs?”

“I’m a professional dog trainer and this is where I exercise them daily”, he replied, proceeding to name each of the twenty by name, specifying their breed. All but one pure bred and the basenji a stowaway on a ship from Thailand! Every dog responded to his name by bounding up and jumping all over him with an expression of pure delight. What had been a blah day (I had been trying to take good pictures of the UCSF Mission complex, which is arguably impossible) turned into a glorious one, just like that, as I shared in the experience with this utterly charming man. Even the fearsome looking bull terrier ambled up and gave me a nice, long lick and a wag. Yes, I checked, and my hand was still there.

I related, of course, that the house pet is a vicious Border Terrier and swear that a look of abject fear flitted across his face. Such is terrier power.

…. and this one is Rex ….”

As he composed himself, I cycled about a bit marveling at this spectacle and, as I made my way back to the city, saw the lot of them engaged in some sort of competitive ball game, right by that stretch of water where a big hit from the ball park splashes down.

Want a long, healthy, happy life? Get a dog.

All snaps on the Panny G1 with the kit zoom.

The Oriental Warehouse

Photographs

A charming period piece.

Located at 650 Delancy Street at Brannan, in San Francisco, the Oriental Warehouse has been beautifully restored and now does duty as residential condo housing. The preserved exterior loading bay doors remain in place, somewhat strangely supplemented by a modern stainless steel addition, and what better opportunity for some good old fashioned black and white?

The Oriental Warehouse. G1, kit zoom @ 31mm, ISO 320.

The dynamic range here is so huge I had to expose for the highlights in the steel door (the Panny’s sensor eagerly awaits any opportunity to burn our highlights) then brought detail back in the original oak doors by using the selective adjustment tools in Lightroom3, which detail was otherwise lost in the stygian gloom.

Here’s the story, courtesy of the little Panny’s built-in flash: