Blue and green waste receptacles next to a glass wall at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco.
I’m tempted to not say much about this photograph, beyond the basics of where and when and what. The “where” is along the wall of the performing arts center at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. The when is on a morning with high fog that produced some nice, diffused light. The “what” is, well, a couple of trash cans in front of a large window, behind which there are a couple of other trash cans in the same color scheme, a drinking fountain, and some yellow walls. Profound, no? :-)
A person walks past the bottom of a stairway along Stockton Street, San Francisco.
On this mid-July morning I was walking through sections of downtown San Francisco, on my way from Market Street up through parts of Chinatown and heading toward North Beach. It was early enough that the bulk of the tourist crowd was still sleeping in or having breakfast, though people were out and about. My plan was to walk up the first block of the main tourist section of Chinatown to grab some storefront photographs, and then to head a bit west to Stockton Street or thereabouts, where things are oriented (much) less towards the tourist trade.
There is a place where there are essentially two layers of streets. Busy Stockton ducks into a tunnel and the street that is right above it ends on a short spur that is mostly parking. I walked to the middle of the sidewalk at the end of this little street, from which I could photograph straight up Stockton. Finishing that I looked for the stairs down to Stockton and happened to pick the one to my left. As I entered the stair well I looked for photographs since I like the angles and the lighting in some of these areas. One landing up I could look down to where the sidewalk coming up through the tunnel met up with the stairs and then emerged into the light beyond. I made an exposure or two of this “urban landscape,” and then as a person walked across the scene I had a moment to channel my “inner HCB” and photograph her blurred form.
Speaking of channeling HCB, there is also a BW version of this image that probably has more of the classic “street” look. At the moment, thinking that I’m in danger of trying to look old school if I go the other way and also enjoying the brown and tan and similar tones in the color version, I’m going with this one.
Black and white photograph of walls, windows, and roof lines of the side of Saint Patrick’s Church, San Francisco.
I don’t know the full history of this church in downtown San Francisco, but I do know that it is visually interesting. It has the appearance of an old cathedral, with the emphasis on old. Parts of the structure appear to be made of reinforced concrete, parts of brick, and a few sections of newer construction. Bits and pieces of all of that appear in this photograph, with some rather old and weathered materials in much of the structure, but with a much more modern-looking outbuilding at lower right.
While there is a large park (Yerba Buena Park) right across the street, much of the other surrounding architecture is quite modern for the most part. Most striking is the deep blue cubic structure of the Contemporary Jewish Museum right next door, but all around much taller and vastly more modern buildings are found. (Some of the light filling the shadows in this photograph is reflected from those buildings.)
I think that this photograph has a lot in common with a number of my photographs of mountains, especially the Sierra Nevada. In fact, I don’t think it is too hard to find parallels to some of the recent photographs of Mount Conness towering above the shorter Polly, Pywiack, and Medlicott Domes near Tenaya Lake along Tioga Pass Road.
A corner store with boarded-up windows in the Chinatown district of San Francisco.
There probably isn’t a whole lot to say about the subject of this photograph other than it is a boarded-up corner store in the Chinatown area of San Francisco, photographed in morning light last July. The components of the scene are kind of odd, I think: a bit of a flag, green awnings and painted wall, the slanting sidewalk with some poles and boxes, and the layers of older and newer boards and graffiti over the windows. I also though the light was interesting, partly because it was short period when the San Francisco fog is breaking up and the light is brighter but still soft, and partly because of the diagonal shadows cast across the vertical and horizontal shapes of the wall.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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