Photocosm

The Closing Year

When last I wrote, the Bay Area was covered with rain. We're in a season which alternates cold Alaskan fronts with clearing. It will end around April or May. Could be worse. Look at 2,000 motorists stranded in the snow on I-70 in Colorado.

There was soft rain in Kensington, near Berkeley. The winds swept the sidewalk and deposited red leaves into a square by the curb near Colusa Market.

When there wasn't rain, there was overcast and mist. A soft fog surrounded a boat dock in San Rafael.

Ranches along the back roads of Marin County were covered by mist.

But the latest weather system cleared out and gave us sunny weather again. The rains had washed third base at a neighborhood ballpark clean.

The light holiday traffic left the San Rafael Bridge wide open.

The sun brightened the Christmas cards inside the window of the Powis Parker business in Berkeley.

The moon set over Mount Tam at sunrise.

In Mill Valley, the planet Venus rested over the Christmas Star on one of the redwood trees decorated with lights for the season. A blackbird flew over Venus, also.

Clear skies at night mean frosty mornings north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The low sun was bright over the ranch lands near Nicasio, but the frost was persistent.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Christmas Day 2007

Merry Christmas to everybody who reads this fine little photo journal. And if you don't read this fine little photo journal, tough luck.

Since I only had today off, I was unable to travel beyond the narrow confines of the Bay Area.  In the early afternoon, after eating every edible present sent to me, I took a long walk to work the calories off and to find some photos. Walked about three hours. Should have walked about a dozen hours, with all that I ate. At least I squeezed through the door.

The Christmas Animal Is Not A Camel. It's a cat that lives around a house on my block. The owners of the house had a lot of work done, and then they apparently abandoned it. They had the entire house lifted for new foundation work, but they never finished the job. They stripped off the walls, so you can see inside all the empty rooms. Haven't seen the owners in months. Doesn't look like the cat will have to vacate the area for quite a long time. Maybe it's the new owner.

The Christmas Flower for 2007 is the California Poppy.  It's the state flower, it's probably my all-around favorite, and it was in bloom a block away from home on Christmas Day.  If flowers have emotions, the poppy looks like a happy flower, sunny. If memory serves, I bought my Canon digital camera in April of this year, and a bit later when I was looking at some website, discovered that I'd bought my camera on the same day in history that the California Poppy had been declared the state flower.

The Christmas Tree. A few blocks from home, I found a bare tree that was casting shadows upon a building next to it. The skies were azure blue today, so I constructed this abstract view of blue and white.

The Christmas People.  Readers know I generally don't photograph people. They're never as good-looking as they believe they are. Even Brad Pitt is starting to lose it. I came upon a bocce ball match a few blocks away from home, and decided I could go ahead and put these people into the photo. They had nice feet.  I'm not sure who won the competition. Had to leave after the second half started. The halftime show -A Musical Tribute to Donald Rumsfeld- was a disappointment.

The Christmas Wrapping.  There's a condo/apartment building in Berkeley called Oliver Lofts, maybe it's in Oakland. I thought the work was finished long ago, but somebody has covered much of the building with a huge white tarp. Guess the builders have to do some repair work or painting. These shots were taken at eye level.  You're looking at pieces of wood that are used to fasten the white plastic tarp to the walls by the sidewalk. I admired it for the abstract symmetry of the image. I hope they keep that white covering up forever. The Oliver residents might feel otherwise, but some people just don't appreciate abstract art. These people are living inside an art installation, I hope they feel some gratitude.

One of the buildings owned by the University of California-Berkeley has an American Flag over the entrance. I know some Americans would expect a Soviet Flag or some Marxist banner overhead, but those days are over. These days, Cal-Berkeley is 100 percent American. They even have a football team, a good one, that has gone to bowl games. Their fight song is "The Internationale." Anyway, I cropped the picture so the flag is in the upper right corner.

The Christmas Solar Panel. I was watching Zeitgeist last week, that inventive independent movie that has become very popular on the Internet. There's the point made in the first third of the movie about the solar myths through history. Many cultures have created stories about gods who have died on the 22nd or so or December -just before the winter solstice. The sun then goes through a period when it appears to stand still. There's a kind of wobble to its path. Finally, around the 25th of December, the solar wobble ends and the nights become a bit shorter, the days become a bit longer. The sun is reborn, you might say. Well, today is Christmas, when the Sun is reborn, so here's a solar panel I found during my walk. I dragged it from its position in the shadows and propped it up against the fence. Nice lines, yes? The vertical orange lines of the fence, the diagonal white, the parallel shadow lines from an unseen fence to the right.

The Christmas Close-Up. This is a self-portrait, hard as it might seem. The solar panel was dark blue, but it reflected enough light to capture me. The solar panel was warped, probably the reason somebody trashed it under a water tower. That's why I look like a saxophone player. In fact, I was standing upright and strong, in my best digital snapshot posture. Call this photo a Photo-Voltaic Photo-Mosaic.

The Christmas Steps. I was walking through the empty parking lot near Orchard Supply Hardware and found these steps. Nice lines, again. We get good shadows when the sun is this low after noon.

Christmas Air Lines.  I was walking home and came upon this mixture of photographic elements. There's a cloud on the left, a sapling in the center, a power line overhead, and a contrail to the right.

I was a few blocks from home when I discovered a red circle made of felt on the sidewalk. It felt like felt, but maybe it was an industrial fabric used as a washer or seal. At any rate, I held onto it for a few more blocks. They're supposed to bring good luck, like rabbit feet. I then came upon a deserted playground that is "all soft." They've covered everything that could hurt a child with plastic or rubber or foam or cardboard. There was a big rubber mat next to the sandbox, so I photographed the red felt circle there. Not sure how the rubber mat can help kids near the sandbox. Parents should be looking at that sand. Don't they realize how deadly sand is?

And here is where we finish the Christmas Day walk, where it started. The sun had dropped low. I expected all the California Poppies to  have closed up, but one flower was still in bloom. After this final Christmas Day photograph, I walked a block farther and concluded my Christmas sojourn.

 

The Winter Rains Begin

It happens every year. About the time the rest of the nation is getting snow, winter rains return to the Bay Area and take people here by surprise. The weather here is so great most of the year, it seems unfair to have this happen to us. Maybe the government is engaging in weather modification again, residents wonder. Finally, reason takes over and people adjust to the smell of mildew in fine stores such as Macy's in Union Square. Can't be avoided. So, for the next few months, rain will be featured in the photographs of Photocosm.

The leading edge of a storm system crosses the Bay. Near the horizon is the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge, then Treasure Island, then the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge, and then a part of Angel Island.

The rains were about two inches in a day. Traffic took the back roads of Marin County to avoid highway 101. I was waiting for them with a camera behind the windshield, the last place they'd look.

Puddles formed in flower beds.

How bad was the rain? I was driving behind an orange truck owned by the state highway department, Caltrans, and they were towing a boat.

A television news station snapped into action and sent ace reporter Lance Mannion to San Anselmo, a small town near the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Last year, the rains flooded the downtown business area. The flood didn't come this time, so the news crew left. Lance Mannion was especially bitter as he returned to the van. "They promised me a flood!" he shouted to his producer, "They promised a flood but they delivered puddles! Nobody gets the Emmy for reporting from a puddle!"  His producer corrected him, "They promised us food. I got a free lunch at Bubba's, where did you eat?"

Traffic coming off the San Rafael Bridge near San Quentin. Because of the storms that come in here from the north -thanks for nothin', Alaska- traffic coming off this bridge and driving west into Marin will encounter tougher rains and winds as they proceed. To get this shot, I had to turn my back to those rains and winds. My neck got wet like you wouldn't believe. And cold. I forgot to turn up that flap that keeps the wind and the rain out.

I walked that afternoon to Berkeley's Photolab and picked up some film they developed. It seemed perfect that a black SUV parked in the lot had a license plate that spelled out AQARIUM. That's right, Aquarium.

First Flight and Blue Angels

Today is one of the most important dates in modern history. On this day in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew for about 12 seconds and made real the promise of heavier-than-air flight. The Wright Brothers had flipped a coin, and Orville got to fly the plane that morning. Wilbur flew later that day, but Orville's flight got the famous photo which a fellow named Daniels took with Orville's camera. After the twelve-second flight which covered about 120 feet, Wilbur rushed up and asked Orville, "How was your flight?"  Orville replied with irritation, "They lost my luggage."

My dad emailed me recently a link to a set of aircraft photos taken by Bernard Zee. He attended the Fleet Week air show in San Francisco and used his Nikon D50 to capture the Blue Angels. Here are a couple of small versions, but take a look at his site's photos. I don't think you'll find better aviation photos.

You have to look carefully, but between all those boats on the bay near the Golden Gate Bridge, there's a Blue Angel jet making a pass at 700 miles an hour. In order to reach this spot, the Navy aviator had to fly under the bridge. Bernard Zee calls this the "sneak pass."

This is an amazing shot. The jet is maybe 30 feet over the bay, and according to Bernard, it's actually transonic, not yet supersonic. Whatever the speed, it must have been astonishing to watch from the boats, unless they blinked.

To see Bernard Zee's shots, click here.

To read about the Wright Brothers and their first flight at Kitty Hawk, click here.

The Power of the Dark Side

I used to shoot a lot of color film in my search for ultimate images, but nobody's perfect. These days, 95 percent of my film shots are black and white. I also shoot a lot of color photos with the Canon Powershot digital camera I bought this year, but if I had a digital camera that could match the tonality of Tri-X black and white film, I'd shoot 95 percent there as well.
These shots are all about silhouettes. You'd think that showing less was less, but with silhouette photos, sometimes showing less reveals more.

Here's a photograph I shot around sunrise in Mill Valley. A blackbird glides over a tree near East Blythedale. Meanwhile, our sister planet Venus hangs over the tree to the right of the bird. No doubt somebody walking a dog in the afternoon could take a beautiful shot of this same image -Venus excepted- but I would not be interested. Too much color.

This doesn't look like a shot from the San Francisco Bay Area, it has clouds. Seems a bit odd to say, but it's true. We generally get clear skies or fog, or a version of early morning clouds that could be fog if they just dipped a bit lower. We don't get a lot of days with distinct clouds. Readers of this fine photo journal will recall an earlier observation I've made about clouds. If you see a cloud float lazily over the Golden Gate Bridge and continue over the bay, it will often shrink and disappear by the time it reaches the Berkeley hills.  In fact, the Bay Area almost never gets the huge, fluffy clouds that huge sections of the country take for granted, cumulonimbus. I once saw a perfect anvil thunderhead hovering over New Mexico and I-25. We'll never get one of those here, probably. So you see, there are some disadvantages to living in paradise.

This was shot at the lagoon of the Marin County civic center. They use narrow lamp posts along the edge of the lagoon to mark the border between walking and wading, but you're looking at one of the posts. These lamp posts are very simple, and they use ordinary light bulbs.

Here's another silhouette. I shot it in the tiny town called Fairfax. The sun was shielded by a low cloud, so I could shoot directly at the sky and not experience the crippling pain of lens flare.  Another case of silhouette superiority.

We're looking at the distant land known as Corte Madera. To the left of the sapling in the center, you can see one of the ferryboats that serve Marin County. You wouldn't believe it, but I'm next door to the infamous prison, San Quentin.  That shouldn't be a surprise. Another prison, Alcatraz, was built in San Francisco Bay. They seem to enjoy putting crime next to beauty, these prison builders. Anyway, the setting here is pastoral, calming, made more beautiful with a little silhoutte.