Photocosm

Sunny Skies Leave Bay Area - Weather Manipulation By Senate GOP To Blame

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Fun while it lasted. The rainy season resumed recently.

Sir Francis Drake is one of the prominent boulevards of Marin County, but today it looked like a mess. This might as well have been Telegraph in Berkeley, or El Camino in Redwood City.
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So you look for beauty where you can find it. Here's the car hood of an old Camaro.
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On a sidewalk at a big office construction project in Berkeley, a clear plastic tarp was sprinkled with pink blossoms.
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And then we had a clearing. We rarely get several days of unbroken rain, one or two days and then we're allowed to see the sun.

Reminds me of something in a Shakespeare play, how the sun looks so much the better when it emerges from the clouds. Maybe a soliloquy from Hamlet. Probably one of those scenes in which Hamlet declares, "I'm gonna do something. Look out, Denmark. I'm gonna take action real soon, watch my dust. What can I do?"
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And then the rain resumed and the California Poppies took a beating. They're tougher than they seem. A little sun and you can almost hear them snapping back into blossoms.
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This dog waited anxiously outside a grocery.
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And then we get a little sun in Berkeley and a rainbow crawls across the street. Better lower than never.
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Camera Van

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I suppose most people will remember today for an exceptional Superbowl -it was a great game and maybe the most exciting finish ever- but I'll recall Superbowl Sunday 2009 for the Camera Van.

Looks like the camera display case at one of those Market Street stores in San Francisco , right? You know, those places with $200 stickers conspicuously marked down to only $80, still twice what you'd pay at honest retailers. Or maybe the window of a camera museum?

It's the Camera Van, the most impressive art car I've ever seen. There are artists around the country who decorate their car with art. I saw last year a van which looked like a three-dimensional map of a city. Buildings covered the van, plus green and blue areas for land and water. It was the City Van. Another car was painted to look like a Mondrian painting, and most recently I saw a van covered with Van Gogh's paintings.

The Camera Van has 2000 cameras and other photographic equipment attached. It's the creation of Harrod Blank. He had parked it on Shattuck in Berkeley for a private party at a restaurant. I just happened to be driving by a couple of hours before the Superbowl kickoff, but there was already a small crowd around the Camera Van. 

This side of the Camera Van has a theme, it's a depiction of the famous Kodak camera, the Instamatic.

The front of the van has the owner's website, www.cameravan.com, in the top of the windshield. The cameras here are mostly Polaroids.

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A closer look at the van's right headlight.

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The passenger door reveals a Big Eye, with colorful filters forming the pupil and iris.

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The back of the van shows the Arizona license plate. Harrod Blank used to have a California plate, with about the same spelling.

Finally, there was something funny about cameras photographing cameras. And maybe something funnier about my camera photographing cameras photographing cameras. 

For a look at the Camera Van website, visit www.cameravan.com.  Harrod Blank has also made a movie about art cars, it's just been released. The movie is Automorphosis, and you can learn about it at www.automorphosis.com.