Fringale

Dining

A spot of France.

Fringale, at Fourth and Brennan in San Francisco, is not your common or garden lunch joint. It may be in a grotty area, but the prices are strictly top dollar and the fare is high quality French. So much so that I was too intimidated to ask for a beer, fearing I might be chucked out on my ear for such crassness.

Click the picture for the site.

I wanted to keep things light – meal and check – so opted for the Salade Niçoise, my crackerjack French pronunciation somewhat smoothing the waters, earlier ruffled by the appearance of my tired Levis. That’s a nice slab of medium rare tuna atop.

The service here is outstanding, the very French proprietor charming and the whole thing comes with a white table cloth feel in a light, clean interior.

Prices are high, especially when you add $10 for a small glass of wine.

Not my regular sort of place, but a nice change for those days when I make a bit of coin in the markets. Too bad about the beer, though I did luck out with a nice street snap right after, inspired by the tuna salad:

Protests, politics and milestones. Fourth near Market Street, SF. G3, kit lens @22mm.

Missing in 2012

Photography

What’s not to miss?

The author’s alter ego, searching out picture opportunities as ever. In Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 lens.

I expect 2012 to be a great year for picture taking, which means I’ll be sharing my opinions, experiences and prejudices with you in this journal as much as ever.

But there are some topics which will continue to be absent from these pages, and they include:

Politics: Any field which attracts the least able, provides no return on time invested and wastes hundreds of hours of the average citizen’s time is most certainly not one for me. I’ll leave the US system of ‘One dollar, one vote’ for debate by those less able.

Religion: Life is too short to debate how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I like the tax exempt aspects of the religion business, but I’m strictly a deathbed-conversion type. Just in case. When there’s a 50/50 shot and there’s no downside to losing, take the bet, like Blase Pascal did.

Economics: Technology and the sciences fascinate me. This is neither, and makes love a relatively logical and predictable field by comparison.

While these three fields of endeavor provide a decent living for many, I have never known any to help me take a good picture.

Thus this journal will stick to its three primary dictates. Photographs – mine and those of others. Lots of both. Photographers, through the mention of books I have enjoyed and by the publication of the work of fellow enthusiasts, movies included. And Photography which spans the gamut of gear talk, technological change and computers as they relate to the topic.

It has never been cheaper, easier or faster to take and disseminate pictures. When this blog started you still had to wait for Kodak to return your slides by USPS (can you think of a more inept pairing?), a costly, slow process fraught with risk. Now you use a three ounce cell phone and upload your snaps to a web service for the whole world to see at negligible cost. Unsurprisingly, Kodak and the USPS are both going out of business.

A new year beckons, so it’s prediction time and my list of worthless guesses follows:

  • I will cease publishing exposure data with my snaps. I mean, c’mon, who cares? It’s an auto-everything world in any case.
  • The point-and-shoot camera is doomed. Bread and butter for the likes of Canon and Nikon who had both better wake up fast. Superior lens, sensor and processing technology in newer cell phones obsolete the need to carry yet another gadget. And the cell phone camera is ‘free’, plus it can upload to the web.
  • I will make $5 million, a new auction record, by taking a picture of my garbage can and retaining Andreas Gursky’s agent to flog it for me. I hope to net $100,000 after commissions and taxes. The underlying storyline will focus on “…. the artist’s deepening conflicts on the meaning of recycling in a post modern age”. The first sale will actually be for no less than $7mm, but the buyer, a hedge fund manager, will bounce the check claiming he needs the loot to pay his lawyers to keep him out of the slammer on insider trading charges.
  • The Lytro camera will fail. Only bad pictures have more than one main subject, and Lytro’s technology caters exactly to that issue. Plus the design looks plain silly and the definition is probably poor.
  • Apple will make a real camera with a Siri command interface and no dumb brick LCD menu system. Offering fewer options than any $200 point-and-shoot it will retail for $500, will take crackerjack snaps in the right hands, and will be sold out for months. Oh! yes, and it will make phone calls and toast on the side.
  • Panasonic will make a pro-grade Micro Four-Thirds camera and you will start seeing it used by pros at sports events. Annual greasing ‘commissions’ from Panny to have pros convince the world that MFT is the Real Thing will run into the $millions. Chiropractors will fight with offsetting bribes to Nikon and Canon pro-DSLRs users in an effort to retain their annuity incomes derived from treating these users for spinal problems.
  • I will narrowly avoid death several times from competing bikers on the streets of San Francisco on BikeCamâ„¢. My latest crappy bike will be stolen, again, but unknown to the thief, this one will have a hidden GPS tracking chip, the frame will be loaded with a pound of C4 and my iPhone will be the remote triggering device.

The dining experience will be increasingly featured as your intrepid snapper-gourmand searches out diverse, and mostly cheap, eating places, which you will find under the Dining category. Don’t look for wine advice here, a good brew being the order of the day.

Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 @9mm with distortion correction.

Cityscapes 2011

Photographs

San Francisco.

By turn strange, surreal, eccentric, colorful, monochromatic and never predictable. San Francisco is all of these, and this is how I saw it over the past twelve months. Unlike my Street Snaps where people are the object of interest, in my Cityscapes people, if they are even present, are part of the broader cityscape.

Click the picture for the slide show.

Mostly snapped on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens, with the last few on the G3. The little Pannys don’t look like much and I can only express my deep gratitude to the maker for that. Electrician’s tape, used to obscure brand names on the hardware, is a useful adjunct. While one was taken with the 45-200mm Panny zoom, the 14-45mm kit lens really is perfect for this sort of thing and it’s all I carry most of the time. Were it non-interchangeable I would not mind one bit. The G3 adds two stops of grain reduction compared to the G1, so in a pinch I’ll enlarge what I need a bit more without compromising quality too much, and avoid having to carry an extra lens, small as it may be.

CameraTrace

Software

Catch that thief.

This is clever. Given that most cameras record their serial number in the photo file’s metadata, this app allows you to track pictures published on sites like Flickr using that serial number, searching for it on the web:

Click the picture for the maker’s site.

Now my Panny G3 is not exactly something I would really miss were it stolen. It’s not ‘throw-away cheap’ but it’s close and, if stolen, likely does not warrant the expenditure of time and effort to recover it, though I suppose the psychic satisfaction of catching a thief might be worthwhile. But if I owned something silly-priced like a Leica M9 or S2, or a digital Hasselblad, then this app would get my attention. As for the iPhone, whose content has value far above the cost of the hardware, ‘Find My iPhone’ does the trick at no extra cost and stories abound of the flat footed set apprehending thieves.

For UK residents, there’s a like app named StolenCameraFinder.

Something to bookmark should that awful day ever come.