Category Archives: Photographs

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.

Greed as Art

Photographs

A number-blind nation’s output.

One of the most obvious ways to economic success is to do the difficult thing, meaning you study math, or chemistry, or engineering at school. Not English or Poetry. While the latter are doubtless noble aspirations their result is that all you are qualified for is to turn out …. more English and Poetry scholars. Neither avocation creates wealth for you or the nation.

And capitalist society is expert at avoiding doing the ‘difficult’ thing, given its desire for instant and easy gratification. Be it passive activities like TV or watching sports, vicariously living the experiences of a highly paid athlete, we are simply being passive consumers, creating no wealth in the process. And the alternatives to creating wealth are easily seen in Africa or North Korea, like it or not.

In Western societies the passivity of populations and their general unwillingness to study difficult subjects is seen daily in macro economics. (In Asia, by contrast, the pure and applied sciences are revered). Had consumers learned one iota of math or finance, the housing bust would never have happened. Predatory lenders would have been short of suckers to buy their criminal products. Liar loans would have not seen the light of day and borrowers would have looked at prospective cash flows in the light of rational expectations for income and expense and made objective, informed decisions as to whether a home and loan were affordable.

So continuing yesterday’s aerial theme, here’s a truly exceptional image from Google (presumably taken by US taxpayer-owned satellites, which makes it especially poignant) of the greed that results from number blindness. It’s of a halted residential real estate development off the I75 freeway in Florida on that state’s central western coast – you know the once pristine one now covered with BP’s crude oil. No great photographer was involved, just a passive drone designed and launched by the same people we denigrate as nerds and mad scientists, which we so sorely lack. They make them in copious numbers in India and China but, being the smart people we are, we refuse them entry. It wouldn’t do to actually enhance the gene pool now, would it?

Take a careful look. This development just stopped – the plots at the upper right have pads but no homes. The others, I would bet, are empty or in foreclosure.

Greed as Art. Stalled real estate development in Florida from Google.

One hundred millionth of a second

Photographs

A very short exposure.

Harold Edgerton’s high speed (more correctly ‘short exposure’) photography is well known. Who is not familiar with his pictures of bullets piercing apples and inflated balloons?

The picture below is different. It’s the simultaneously cruelly ugly and strangely alluring image of the early stages of an atomic bomb explosion.


Atomic blast.

The exposure was on a special camera using an optical shutter tuned to one hundred millionth of a second. You can read the complete story here – the Flash images will not display on an iPad.

Riding

Photographs

You either get it or you do not.

My right wrist is shot.

My gluteus maximus* (aka my left bottom muscle) is stressed to an extent that makes me walk with a limp.

And my neck is so far gone that a look over my shoulder makes paying taxes seem like fun.

In other words, I have been riding an old motorbike in the twisties and couldn’t be happier. What’s wrong with a couple of aspirin and some internal bleeding, after all?

And when I say ‘old motorbike’ I suppose I really should write ‘old BMW motorcycle’ because that’s the only brand that speaks to me. And when I say ‘BMW motorcycle’ I really should write ‘BMW motorcycle with an air cooled, twin cylinder motor’ because like the Leica M2 and M3, they simply do not make them like that any more. A minimum of what you need, promising a maximum of its potential if you rise to the occasion.

So if you don’t ride, get with the action, take some lessons, learn what your sense of smell is really about (bikes have no air conditioning or air filters so you smell where you are, if you get my drift) and stop reading this. But be sure to take a camera.

Here’s where my bike took me for breakfast today.

1989 BMW R100RT at Alice’s Restaurant this morning.
Panasonic LX1.

* Two of the words in the Latin vernacular known to any schoolboy repeatedly caned for misbehavior in the English public school system.

Point Sur lightstation

Architecture

On Highway One.

Go a few miles south of Carmel on California’s Highway One and you will reach a desolate windy stretch of the world’s most beautiful road to which abuts a rock which is home to the Point Sur lightstation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I have been trying to take a half decent snap of this majestically situated relic for some two decades now. First, I can never resist the call of One and while I much prefer to take in that magical highway on a motorcycle, that form of conveyance is ill suited to carrying the sort of gear needed to do Point Sur justice.

On my most recent attempt I was actually visiting One to take some virtual reality panoramas at Point Lobos, just outside Carmel, but could not resist the short drive down to Big Sur, passing Point Sur en route.

The problem with photographing Point Sur is that it’s far away, the gates are always locked, you can’t get a good view of it from close-up, it’s windy as all get up and the place, when not shrouded in mist, is enveloped in sea haze. But this time I came prepared. With monopod and tripod and with that killer duo, the Canon 5D and the Canon 400mm f/5.6 L telephoto. The latter, while huge and unwieldy, is by a considerable margin the best 400mm lens I have used and will likely remain so because the next step up is Canon’s f/4 and f/2.8 variants and I have more sense than the money demanded for these.

To cut a long story short, I banged away from the roadside, over the fence, with the hardware neatly supported on a monopod, trying not to sway in the heavy wind. The long Canon lens does not make matters easier by offering a lot of barrel for the wind to push on. I left the lens fully open as it gets no sharper stopped down and because I wanted the shortest possible shutter speed at the optimal ISO 400 setting on the 5D’s grainless sensor. The image was made in RAW format, of course, as I knew a lot of post processing would be needed to bring up the tones and contrast, experience having taught me it is very hard to destroy the quality of a 5D RAW image no matter how much you tweak things.

Well, here she is. I can still do better and propose to spend another 20 years trying, but this will have to do for now. The camera was maybe a mile from the buildings.

Point Sur lighstation. Canon 5D, 400mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO400, processed heavily in Lightroom 3.

Here’s the original – let me tell you that even with a monopod it’s a challenge holding this rig level in heavy wind.

Original.

To read more about Point Sur click here, bought to you by us California taxpayers who are largely refused entry to this special place.