Photocosm

Protecting Our Land And Snack Foods

I recently saved the life of a skunk. It wasn't mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I slammed on the brakes in a parking lot and let it waddle across the lane. Which reminded me, it's time to show you recent photos of animals which are not skunks.

 

A cat in Berkeley at a window store waves hi.

 

In San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighorhood, a guard cat at night eyes me from its patrol station.

 

Waiting for its ride to karate practice.

 

A sentry cat in Emeryville watches from above. It works for Apex Alarm Systems.

 

A flavor guard at a convenience store monitors the freshness of Frito-Lay snacks.

 

A crow takes a snack break.

 

A dog in Emeryville gives me his impression of a shark. You can't help but see the resemblance. Jaws with ears.

 

His impression of a grizzly bear. I ran away screaming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lunar Orbiter Saw Us From The Moon, Does Galen Rowell See Us From Mount Whitney?

Today is an important day in photographic history.  On this day back in 1966, we earthlings finally got our closeup.

Today in 1966, NASA's Lunar Orbiter took the first photograph of Earth from space. Lunar Orbiter I was the first of five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft which mapped almost all of the moon. They were pointing the cameras down, but then NASA changed the angles of the camera and photographed our planet. The reaction back on earth was electric. Nobody had any idea just how heavenly and small we looked from space.  It was an amazing image for what it represented. To paraphrase the mission of Star Trek, now we could boldly see where no man had ever gone before.

I don't remember where I was on this day in 1966.  Probably doing laps at swimming team practice.

 

All those great images from the Apollo missions and from Hubble got their start here in 1966.

 

 

Today is also the birthday of the late Galen Rowell, a wilderness photographer and journalist. What Ansel Adams was to black-and-white wilderness art, Galen was to color mountaineering photography.

Galen was born in Oakland, California in 1940. He hiked mountains in the Sierra Nevada by his teens, he graduated from Berkeley High School, and then he studied physics at UC Berkeley. Galen never graduated, though, he loved the mountains too much. He started an automobile shop and ran it until he decided to make a profession out of his obsession. He sold his auto business in 1972 and became a full-time professional photographer.

Galen was a kind of triple threat, a first-rate mountain climber who also took beautiful photos in the wilderness, and who also wrote eloquently about his travels. He worked for some of the big names in photography and publishing, such as National Geographic and Outdoor Photographer.

 

The book that made Galen Rowell famous in the 1980s was the book I studied before I moved to California, Mountain Light. He presented dozens of photographs from his mountain adventures, along with descriptions of the moment: how he found the opportunity, how he adjusted to the light, and how he made sure the camera caught the magic. The book is part-coffee table book, part-how-to manual, part-advocacy for protecting the wilderness. You can't read his book without feeling he was wise beyond his years.

The wisdom of the book which I recall even now is that photography is about our relationship with light.  Light reveals, light responds, light allows. We can't tell light what to do. You have to be sensitive to what light has on its mind, and you have to react quickly to what it bestows. Light moves faster than we do, so you can't run up to a rainbow unless it likes you. Something like that.

I bought and studied Mountain Light back in Nebraska, along with a book of Elliot Porter photographs and something by David Muench.  I learned how to appreciate and record the awesome beauty of nature. I organized my hiking trips to visit what they had photographed. But when I decided to move to California in 1990, I had to sell my book collection to finance the move. I don't regret losing those books, they served their purpose.

 

A famous photo from Mountain Light, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet.

Galen tells a vivid tale of spotting the rainbow and running a mile or half-mile at more than 10,000 feet to get the right angle. His story of that shot, just one of 75 or 80 in the book, is an example of pre-visualization, preparation, and execution. If you believe in reincarnation, Galen's lifetimes in Tibet filled his lungs as he ran down the rainbow.

 

I never met Galen Rowell or his wife, Barbara. I lived near their business in Emeryville, Mountain Light, but he was a busy man and I wasn't. I visited a few times and enjoyed the large and vivid prints of his famous photos in their gallery. I remember Barbara's Mercedes parked out front. The license plate holder read, "I'd Rather Be Flying A Cessna". Barbara was a licensed pilot who flew Galen around for his adventures and wrote about their flights.

On the 19th of July, 2002, I visited a Safeway in Alameda, California. I would have forgotten that visit like all the others, but there was a black car with the license plate GALEN in the Safeway lot. That car had no connection with Galen Rowell. I would learn later the son of the car owner was named Galen, but I was happy to get the photo nonetheless. Sometimes, when the time is right and the light is generous, a great license plate is my Tibetan rainbow.

Three weeks later, on the 11th of August, Galen and Barbara died in an airplane crash near Bishop. They were passengers riding with a couple of friends. It was a night flight, their pilot-friend didn't have much experience with night landings. They were all killed instantly. The shocked tributes came from everywhere: friends, fellow professionals, and celebrities such as Robert Redford and Tom Brokaw. They were remembered by the Dalai Lama, who worked with the Rowells for the book My Tibet.

Today, Mountain Light continues in Bishop, where Galen and Barbara had moved it in 2001.

To wrap this up, years later I would photograph two other license plates. On the same day in 2004, a plate with GALEN R and a plate with T ROWELL.  Try to imagine the odds. They were side-by-side on a roll of film, and consecutive pictures on the contact sheet. That was a great photo day. Not a rainbow landing at a palace in Tibet, but something like that. Maybe a double rainbow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Day After Groundhog Day

Memory Loss. It comes to us all sooner or later or sooner or right now. In photography, memory cards lose their memory as well. If you're lucky, it's a soft-fail.  Memory cards often let you know. First they drop a pixel or two. Big deal, it's a 14-megapixel camera. What's a couple of dark spots surrounded by millions of bright ones?

But then the memory card loses groups of data. You photograph the woman of the hour at her 51st birthday party, Aunt Gretchen. The memory card loses her nose.

And then there's the hard fail, and that's what you see here. Ugly, isn't it? This bad memory moment struck before noon.  It's called Memory Card Error. Seems so innocent, doesn't it? Oops, we had a little error here, we lost some photos. How many photos? Picture it this way.  Imagine an outfielder who loses a fly ball in the sun, and he makes an error that allows thirty-one runs to score. More on this later.

 

But let's look back to a happier time, the 6th of May.  My primary camera worked fine.  I know that because I shot this in the afternoon.What is it? You're looking at a United States flag. Hard to make out, but it's attached to the back of a silver pickup.

Also attached to the back of the pickup? It appeared to be the license plate for a Navy Seal. NVY SEAL or NVE SEAL, something like that. I had seen it a block or two away, at a red light. I jogged the street to get a close shot, but the lights went green and the silver pickup drove south. I held the camera up high and got the best shot possible, which wasn't much. All you see is the American flag. Rats.

Why my disappointment?  On the day I got that shot, President Obama had flown to Fort Campbell, Kentucky and congratulated the Navy Seals who participated in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Or one of Bin Laden's doubles or triples. President Obama awarded the Navy Seals with the Presidential Unit Citation, which is the highest award a President can give to an organization.

How coincidental, I thought, seeing a Navy Seal plate for the first time on the very day the President visited the Navy Seals. And what little I had to show for it, a distant flag on a pickup.

So we're back to this morning and the memory card failure. How many photographs did I lose this morning from the Error? All of them, which is another way of saying I had zero photographs. Goose eggs.

Which makes this photo special in a sad way. I shot it with my backup camera. In the foreground is the black camera with its Memory Card Error. And what was the photographic subject before the memory card went goose eggs? The license plate 00.

 

I visited Best Buy after work. As I walked in, a group of Buddhist monks walked out. Hmm, odd. Good to see they're living in the 21st Century. I bet they bought iPhones. I don't have an iPhone. My good karma has earned me an iPhone.

 

I bought a 16-gigabyte memory card. It worked instantly and perfectly, and now I started a search. What could I photograph today which would compensate me for my pain and suffering? All those photos lost to the Memory Card Error.

 

I was walking home with the new memory card, and what should I see but the American flag on the back of a silver pickup.

I finally got the Navy Seal plate, a few months after I first saw it. The driver was great. He had been a Seal long ago, participated in missions to recover POWs in Asia. He doesn't live in the Bay Area at all, not permanently. He's way up north, actually. I didn't ask him about the Osama Bin Laden mission. When I meet somebody with an interesting and personal plate, I let them decide what to reveal.

I do remember this. He said when he went through his training, there were guys who had the more All-American Soldier looks. They had that Captain America build and manner, but they didn't make it. He decided it wasn't the outside that would get him through the training, but something inside. He wanted it more, being a Navy Seal. His sister says he should have been killed a dozen times. But he survived and now he has another life in California.

I told the  Navy Seal guy he reminded me of Phil, the Bill Murray character from the great movie, Groundhog Day. Bill Murray realizes he's immortal in Groundhog Day. He kills himself over and over, but he's good as new the next morning when 6:00:00 comes and the clock wakes him up. Eventually, Phil leaves that stage of his personal evolution behind, but I won't spoil the movie for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Return of the Skywalker

I was reading this morning Garrison Keillor's website,  The Writers Almanac, and what should I see but mention of maybe the greatest daredevil stunt in history. 

I wrote about this "stunt" on Photocosm back in 2008, and it deserves a re-reading. This might be the first time I've done a rerun, but if you aren't familiar with the story, you'll admire the aerial artistry which Philippe Petit performed on this day in 1974.

Here's my original post about the movie Man On Wire and its star, the young skywalker Philippe Petite. From the first of August, 2008 Photocosm:

 

Young Skywalker

 

 

I was wandering aimlessly through San Rafael this morning, taking my usual route, when I looked up and noticed a young man on a tightrope. Was that the French aerial artist, Philippe Petit? And was he walking a tightrope across 4th Street in San Rafael? Sure, but what was Philippe doing in San Rafael, besides crossing 4th Street the hard way? No net, no harness, no ropes, just a long balancing pole to keep him suspended safely above the traffic on 4th Street. What guts, what agility, what balance.

Take a closer look, now. What's that on the left, that dark building? That is one of the World Trade Center towers back in 1974. You are actually looking at my photograph of a movie poster inside a glass case at the Rafael Theater. Philippe on the wire is in the upper half of the poster. The glass also reflected the businesses along 4th Street behind me. If you never heard of Philippe Petit, he was walking the sky a year or two before Star Wars. The movie on the poster is titled Man On Wire.

 

On the 7th of August, 1974, Philippe Petit accomplished the greatest stunt of all time, except for maybe that hilarious D.B. Cooper incident. Philippe Petit was 24 years old. Without approval, he installed a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He then stepped off the south tower and onto the tightrope, 110 floors above the planet, about 1300 feet.

Did Philippe Petit cross the tightrope and step off once he reached the north tower? No he did not, he's French. He made 8 crossings, he watched airliners passing, he talked to a seagull that flew around him. Philippe Petit did pretty much everything he could to delay the end of his walk. He sat down on the steel cable. He danced. He captivated and thrilled people on the ground and in the windows of the downtown skyscrapers.

The police did the best they could trying to talk him off the tightrope, but when Petit got to the north tower, he turned and ran back toward the middle! According to a police officer at the scene, Philippe Petit was bouncing up and down from the tightrope, during which his feet were actually leaving the tightrope.

 

 

Here's a photo I shot Wednesday. A woman was skipping rope in Emeryville. Her feet did appear to leave the ground as well. I was impressed by her as well. No net, no ropes. What guts, what agility, what balance.

Petit was eventually motivated to conclude his show because the police said they would send a helicopter to pluck him off the tightrope, and he was concerned about the winds a helicopter would create around him. Forty-five minutes after he started, Philippe Petit stepped off the tightrope and into police custody.

Petit's skywalking adventure made headlines around the world and brought the new World Trade Center publicity they needed. The twin towers weren't completed yet, and businesses were not racing to lease space there. Petit's stunt put the twin towers on the map, so to speak, and the charges against him for the illegal crossing were dropped. The city realized how special his achievement was, and the Port Authority gave him a lifetime free pass to the observation deck of the World Trade Center.

 

There's a movie about Philippe Petit that's opening soon at the Smith-Rafael center, Man On Wire. I heard a radio interview with the director of the movie, it sounds good. The movie has already won awards, including the jury and audience prizes at Sundance.

Update

Exciting story, isn't it?

After this original post and the Sundance prizes, Man On Wire collected more awards. The movie won the Oscar for best documentary at the 81st Academy Awards.