The contrast of textures and shapes really attracted me to this shot: glossy glass and steel in the background buildings in contrast to the Harbor Court Hotel’s matte brick, and ephemeral sea birds in contrast with the solid structure of the hotel.
Tag: City
San Francisco Looming
There’s too much unsettling photography out there to limit my Halloween to just a single photograph! The image of a completely dark San Francisco (in the moment between the sun beginning to set and all of the headlights and streetlights turning on), with its specific skyline rising from the mist of the marine layer, just screams “post-apocalyptic cityscape.” Or do I detect a hint of Blade-Runner-esque “California of the Future” in the angles and orange colors? While I’m on the topic of future and past, I have a question:
Do you George Lucas your work?
This photography is one of the first that I ever took with a “real” camera, in the late fall of 2011. The RAW file was sitting quietly on my external storage drive, fallow and ready to live again. In comparing this image with the original approach I took to processing, I see enormous differences and enormous improvements—or at least an evolving artistic sensibility. I’d call this approach “George Lucasing:” going back to old work and updating or improving as my skills improve. And I’m not sure I like that it’s something I should do. Photography captures a moment, and needs a sense of finality. On the other hand, if I am spatially removed from a place (be it San Francisco or South Africa), without the immediate opportunity to return, can this creation be a healthier expression of nostalgia?
Jamaica Bay to Manhattan
Departing JFK International Airport over Jamaica Bay, with the Manhattan skyline glittering in the sunrise, brings to mind my favorite topic: the gradient between dense urbanization and “wilderness.” If there’s a consistent theme to my photography, it’s the desire to capture this gradient in a single image (as I sometimes have in other settings.) Even my wide angle lens couldn’t capture the whole scene, but here’s One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building alongside the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, with New Jersey and Brooklyn buffering and smoothing the divide to a gradient.
City of the Future!
In the distance land of Portland, Oregon, urban renewal has transformed the rail yards of the Pearl District into galleries and shops and condos in towering new buildings. Doesn’t this scene look like a futuristic utopia? (Hopefully it’s not moments away from the shattering realization that it’s all built on some “Soylent Green”/”The Giver”/”Equilibrium”-esque lie.)
Sunset in the Pearl District
Even if the architecture is a bit newer than I prefer, my eyes still open a little wider and my knees get a bit wobbly and my camera springs into action whenever I find myself above urban rooftops.
Technogothic
Wandering around Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, I kept waiting to find a security checkpoint and guards with assault rifles; I guess I never got far enough before I had to swing back to my chemistry conference. The combination of Gothic architecture with the modern buildings of Ottawa’s skyline, and with the tiny technotouches of modern security systems, made for a delightful combination. This is our science-fiction present, I suppose.
Canal Escape
The heart of Ottawa clusters Neo-Gothic architecture around Parliament Hill and the canal. Whether hosting a Lupin-III-esque heist or serving as the perfect setting for a James-Bondian escape scene, it’s hard to shake the imagined adventures of speed boats and thugs on motorcycles negotiating the steps of the lock system
The Impossible Hotel
The Fairmont Château Laurier dominates downtown Ottawa; the effect is only exaggerated by the distorted effect of this multi-shot panorama. The people and buses and even the capital seem normal, but as it rises, the structure becomes increasingly Hogwartsian.
Beyond Berkeley
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
Secret Francisco Path
That the hills of San Francisco are so steep that sidewalks become stairs is fantastic. (In literal sense of being fantastical.) Traversing the city feels less like plotting out positions on a grid than navigating a mountain labyrinth. Climbing Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower in the light of the setting sun only serves to amplify the sense of strange magic that San Francisco offers.
Shattuck Rooftops
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
Across Russian Hill
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is largely trapped by water. Like Manhattan, the city has preserved large swaths of “natural” space (e.g. Central Park, Golden Gate Park) in that hyperdense urban mass. The Mediterranean climate, youth, and topographical preposterousness of San Francisco give it a unique (pardon the neologism) architexture. Looking west from the trees of Telegraph Hill, over Russian Hill and on to the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cross-section of environments complement each other. My mind still struggles to see the towers of Russian Hill in the same image as the inhospitable rocks of Marin.
OMNI
I’m down in New Haven, CT for a conference—a great opportunity to shoot a classic American east-coast city, you say? But my camera is doing double duty shooting horses this weekend! What is a photographer without a camera (and with a lovely view of New Haven in the morning from the top of the Omni Hotel) to do? I’m not the biggest evangelist for iPhone photography, but in a pinch (and with the help of a handy bracketing app), it’s possible to account for a lot of the device’s shortcomings and produce photos that can transmit at least a degree of the desired effect. For the ubiquitous “multitool in your pocket,” that’s pretty good.
This is Telegraph Ave.
A mid-winter shot down Telegraph Ave. to the heart of Oakland (from the top of Berkeley’s Campanile) is more nostalgia-tinged now than when I took it. And I do appreciate the way that this shot captures the Bay and the hills ringing it, the silvan suburbia of the East Bay, and even the oddly broad California streets.
Ultimately, even with the benefit of nostalgia, I still have mixed feelings about Oakland. In some ways, the existence of Oakland allows San Francisco to be an “unbalanced chemical equation,” pushing off many of its problems across the bay. Everything can still look peaceful from a distance.
Terminal Aquatic
From San Francisco’s Embarcadero, looking south a sunset, the water provides a gentle palette. (At least compared with the jagged edges of the office buildings against the smooth gradient of the almost-night sky.) My only regret is that the water could not have been a flawless, glassy mirror. Perhaps next time, I’ll settle for a longer exposure.
Decaseconds 