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.

Aperture cheap

Software

There’s a reason for that.

Apple just opened its App Store for the Mac, but to get at it you must first update to OS 10.6.6 (free).

The update places an App Store icon in your dock, thus:

The format of the AppStore remains the same, confused, poorly laid out and hard to find one used in the iTunes store and the iPad/iPhone App Store:

And if you like photo processing software that is buggy, slow, needs costly hardware to run and may well lose your pictures, you can now get it cheaper than ever. It’s Apple’s Aperture brought to you by the company which never discounts its software. Aperture started life at $499, dropped to $299, dropped to $199 (and kept dropping photos from your catalog) and has now crashed, like the Mac you are using it on, to …. $79.99.

So now you can lose your pictures for less than ever before. Now if you had a crappy product you needed to sell to keep the developers on board, would you be increasing the price? Hardly.

For those seeking to escape the tyranny of Aperture (I exited at v2.0, ten times bitten twice shy) you can see my piece on how to escape here. Lightroom continues to be bog reliable, fast, ever better with new noise reduction and distortion controls in v3 and doesn’t need a supercomputer to run fast. It never locks up for this user. Lightroom is $300 and given that it works, it’s worth a boatload more.

Think things have improved in Aperture v3? Think again. Here’s today’s screen snap from the Apple Discussion Board – notice anything?

Grumbling aside, the OS X AppStore is a move in the right direction, should expand the market for independent developers’ work and adopts the ‘register once, buy easily thereafter’ model familiar to every iPhone and iPad user. That part is well engineered and there is no evidence to suggest that Apple is lying when it says it does not sell your ID.

And you know the best thing about it? It runs perfectly on the best OS X machine made, a HackPro, and supports that third monitor just fine.

Finally, for those of you in high sales tax jurisdictions, buy from the AppStore and you will be charged sales tax. Buy direct from the developer and you will not pay any. Hey, it’s your choice.

Vivian Maier

Photographers

An unknown street photographer.

Kickstarter is a sort of poor man’s venture capital fund raising effort. I first came across it when an engineer designed an elegant watch band for the sixth generation iPod Nano, soliciting the required $15,000 in funds to get production off the ground using Kickstarter. I happened to have a Nano lying around so sent the young entrepreneur Scott Wilson $50 for his beautifully designed LunaTik watch band. Scott ended up raising an astonishing $941,718 with each investor getting one of his watch bands when they become available.

Now there’s another thrilling Kickstarter project devoted to showcasing the work of a 1960s Chicago street photographer named Vivian Maier. John Maloof came across some 100,000 (!) of her negatives at an auction and realized he had hit on a treasure trove of great work by this reclusive photographer.

Click the above and you will be taken to the Vivian Maier blog, where you too can subscribe. This is a great way of supporting little known photography which is desperately in need of exposure.

Here’s an example of her work:

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