Photocosm

The Top Of The World - In Berkeley

How do you reach the top of Mount Everest?  If you're looking for the mountain, you fly to Nepal and head up a glacier and wear an oxygen mask to get your shot at the top of the world, 29,028 feet or so above sea level.

Or you can do what a building painter did this morning in Berkeley, California.  You set up a scaffold and climb on top. Easy.  Click on the thumbnail to see the name on the yellow sign.  Mount Everest is the name of this restaurant near the Berkeley campus.  I shot the photo this morning as the painter was preparing for the day's work.

Does this photo look contrived?  It's a tip of the hat to the real mountain, but maybe it forces a connection between that painter and a real Mount Everest climber.  It's a photo gimmick, maybe, but today is the one day of the year when it's also synchronicity.

This is the anniversary of the original summit at Mount Everest.  On May 29th, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finished their ascent.  They reached the top at 11:30 in the morning, stayed there just 15 minutes, then descended into the record books.  And now you know the rest of the...history.

70 Today - The Golden Gate Bridge

Today is the 70th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was this day in 1937, about 6 in the morning, that the Golden Gate Bridge opened up for traffic.  By 6:05, there was the first protest demonstration on the bridge, led by Citizens United To Save The Buggy Whip. By 6:30, they had started the first San Francisco-to-Stockton marathon from the bridge. By 6:35, they'd had a fare increase for the bridge toll, and by 6:45, traffic was backed up to Mount Shasta.

I didn't know about the 70th until I came back to the East Bay from Marin County this morning.  However, there is a good view of the bridge from Berkeley's shore, so I climbed the dangerous slopes of the hills at Caesar Chavez Park.  From there, I photographed this shot.  You can see the bridge in the bottom center, but what's that ring up there?  That, dear readers, is a kite. There's an international kite festival each year at Chavez, but not till late June. Still, the breeze was good, so a few people were there early to put their stuff up.

Why the dangerous slopes of Chavez? Landfill. The park is a big plot of landfill next to the bay. As the landfill sinks and eventually settles, small holes and cracks appear in the soil. The uneven surface is difficult to walk sometimes if you're distracted by kites and bridges. Many a visitor has rolled an ankle there, which is why you never see any ballroom dance parties at the park. And the landfill produces gas, which you can sometimes smell if conditions are right...wrong.

Guess this continues the "ring series" in the posts, at least for two of them. The last post showed the rings above Saturn, and now we have the ring over the bay. Maybe the next post will show a ring around the collar.

Stunning Saturn - 1,300,000 Miles Away

NASA has a website named Astronomy Picture of the Day, a favorite of mine for several years.  This photo of Saturn was posted there late in 2006, but now seems the time to post it here.  This is the best photo of space I've ever seen, and that's why it's the first photo I've presented at Photocosm which was not my own. As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger, more monolithic photo.

This photograph of Saturn is so pure, it could be confused for a special effect from a movie studio. Call me a pushover, but I'm still amazed at this image.  It's real.  Somebody built a machine so reliable, it survived the rocket launch into space, it survived a billion miles from Earth to Saturn, and then it opened its eyes and gave us this.  Beautiful.

This photo was constructed from a mosaic of shots the Cassini satellite took on September 15th, 2006.  There are several versions of this image.  There's one that NASA has annotated to describe the colors of the rings.  There's also a version that's been manipulated to brighten the planet, since we see it in shadow.  There are also large download versions of the image, not just the desktop wallpaper kind.  The large TIFF version you can download is about 11 megabytes.

Look carefully at the photo when you download the desktop version, and you can see Earth. It's a pale blue dot near the left rings.  This may be the distance record for a photo of Earth, although the New Horizons satellite going to Pluto should exceed this one.

I've read that Saturn was the original choice by Arthur C. Clarke when he co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It was based upon a short story, The Sentinel.  This was changed for the movie because Stanley Kubrick could never get Saturn's rings right when he was making a model of the planet.  Jupiter was easy to model, so they used it. 

Also in the short story by Clarke, the monolith was originally a pyramid surrounded by a force field.  I haven't read why the change from the pyramid to the monolith was made for the movie, but it's hard now to imagine 2001 without it. Some have speculated that Kubrick regarded the monolith as a symbol for the movie screen.  Visualize the monolith sideways, and it matches the film frame which was used for the Cinerama projection of the movie. I'd write more about the movie, but this is Saturn's hour. It's earned it.

Click here for the NASA page where the versions of this image are available: SATURN.

Reservoir Geese

There's a reservoir on the drive from Berkeley to the Point Reyes shore.  I was driving this morning in the Point Reyes-Berkeley direction and noticed a couple of birds on a rock near the shoreline.  They were a couple of geese, maybe ducks. From my position facing the sun, they were more silhouettes than birds.  The birds were honking quite a lot on that rock.

After a few minutes, the geese left the rock and flew around the water together. One goose was heard saying to the other, "You're right, this was worth a detour, it does look like Scotland. That cow sounds almost like a bagpipe.  But now we're flying in circles. Why are we flying in circles?  I thought you said you know the way to Canada.  We're going to get there too late, now, we're going to miss all the good parties. Let's go someplace else.  I hear good things about Oxnard."

And here is a shot of a goose with some young ones. No doubt they're saying, "Mom, can we go to Oxnard? Can we? Can we? We hear good things."  I shot it at another body of water in Marin on Sunday, but in the same area.

 

For new readers, the comment link is below. Feel free to honk back. Or quack back. Maybe they were ducks.

The Painters

I've always admired the work of painters. They show us the world in a way we have not seen before, and often they create a world we've never seen at all.  Even the most literal painter calls our attention to something we should examine more carefully.  As a child, I recall poring over the paintings reproduced in the Childcraft series of books.  I was pouring my oatmeal or orange juice when I wasn't careful, but I had to see the paintings. Those Rembrandt skies were amazing before the oatmeal.  My dad painted oils way back then, my mom paints watercolors today.  Here are a couple of Bay Area artists I've met. As always, click on the thumbnails for larger photos, unless you prefer miniature paintings.

Britt-Marie Pazdirek does landscapes.  I've attended three of her shows in the Berkeley area.  She likes to stay at the location to do her painting, which limits her chances.  If the light goes bad on a shoreline, she's maybe lost a painting.  I gave Britt-Marie my solution: take a camera to the beach and take a photograph when the light is good, then do her painting from the photo back in the comfort of her home.  She told me that would be cheating, to which I replied, "We're artists, the rules of society do not apply to us."  I told Britt-Marie how Gauguin's best paintings of Tahiti came from postcards and wall calendars before he ever went there, and then she hit me with a paintbrush.

Britt-Marie's most recent show is at the Turn of the Century in Berkeley, on San Pablo and near Dwight.  She has a few of her landscapes on display there.

I asked Britt-Marie where she'd like to go next and paint. I think she mentioned Ireland. She'd like to walk the streets of Dublin on June 16th. She'd like to visit 7 Eccles Street.  Just look at Britt-Marie's gaze here.  She is looking toward San Pablo Avenue, but she sees Ireland.

 

Sam Andrew lives up in Marin County.  He's quite accomplished at creating group portraits of people who not only didn't pose together, but in many cases have never met each other.  He makes it work.  In one painting, I think he had a couple of dozen small portraits.  The little one of me was quite good, I don't recall how anybody else looked.  This is a photo of Sam putting the finishing touches on his latest WHILE directing traffic on 4th Street. The traffic stopped, by the way.

Here you see the way Sam works.  He prefers to prop his canvas up against the cafe window, thus exposing it to natural light.  This isn't as easy as it seems.  Most of the time, patrons of the cafe are sitting at the table, but who doesn't like to watch an artist work?  I would have paid extra to eat at a table where Monet was doing something with water lilies. Just one of those coincidences, notice how Sam is between his painting and a poster for a movie.

I think I asked Sam one day what he'd like to be doing if not painting. He said he'd like to play for a rock band. Well, isn't that the way it is? Politicians are fascinated with movie stars, and rock stars want to be actors, and artists want to play psychedelic 60's rock. Well, I say good luck. He's a good guy, I have faith in Sam, and  BBHC.com.

San Francisco

As I convert my original website, www.maxclarke.com, to a blog, I've moved the San Francisco photos into an album. Just click on the thumbnail to the left. Not a lot of photos, but there's room to grow.