With no specific photo goal or subject in mind, I went to three towns on the shore of San Francisco Bay this weekend. Crockett, Martinez and Port Costa are all three fairly close together. Crockett and Port Costa are towns that time forgot, and seem stuck in time about 50 years ago. Martinez is small, [...]
Camera clubs disqualify images that a judge determines to be "photos of someone else's art." But if you put your spin on such subject matter, that's OK. Fortunately, this isn't a camera club competition. Here are two photos of other people's art from the Burning Man exhibit currently at the Oakland Museum. Named "Trocto," [...]
I drove across the Bay Bridge early Sunday morning to catch the 7 a.m. shuttle from Treasure Island to the Yerba Buena Island viewpoint. The shuttle didn't get there till past 7:30, so my plans for catching the earliest light on the bridge went by the wayside, but it was still directional early morning light [...]
Because the Salesforce Transit Center has been open for such a short time, everything is clean and new, unlike what you find in other public spaces in San Francisco. The sidewalks are pristine, the drinking fountains work, the bathrooms are clean, the greenery is neat and trimmed, and the tables and chairs in the courtyard [...]
In the previous post, all the photos were shot with my monochrome camera; in this post, they were all shot with a color camera. I don't convert color photos to black and white—it feels like taking something away from the image. Early morning on Main Street in Ferndale. These Italianate buildings built in 1900 are [...]
On Saturday I went to the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and took the tour, which is offered twice a month on the first and third Saturdays. It costs only $5 and lasts two hours. There were about 10 people in my group. The guides explicitly tell you that you're free to photograph whatever you want. [...]
I walked around downtown San Francisco on Sunday in beautiful weather and photographed not people (well, very few people) but buildings. It's not an original observation, but monochrome works especially well for architecture. And in post, I can easily turn skies almost black, which gives the images with light or white buildings a lot of [...]
I arrived before sunrise at Mare Island in Vallejo on Sunday, hoping to get early morning light on the old buildings there. No such luck. It was overcast and stayed that way all morning. So I shot in monochrome. I've been there before and had a couple of subjects in mind, like St. Peter's Chapel, [...]
I drove into Oakland early Sunday morning specifically to photograph the court house front-lit by the rising sun. But it was overcast, so I had to wait. I know—it's just a building, which is not the most exciting subject, even though, having been built in 1936, it is historic. But I really like the [...]
I went into San Francisco yesterday with a vague idea of what I wanted to shoot. I knew I wanted to arrive early at Mission Dolores because it's a white building that would be front-lit and would stand out in black and white against the dark sky. Beyond that, I thought I'd walk into the [...]