02.25.08
Posted in Good Stuff, Photography at 12:29 am by thomas
About a year ago I wrote about another one of the local corner stores biting the dust. Well, I was a bit premature with my elegy for the lost market. As it turns out the store has been revived under a new name and I assume under new management.
The Russian Hill Finest Market actually still has the old New Russian Hill Grocery sign out front, a fact that warmed my overly nostalgic heart. 
This is another picture I took on Kodak TMax 3200 with my Retinette 1A. I really love the fact that with this film I can handheld shots like the one above while walking around the city. I’ll have to investigate what kind of fast rollfilm I can get for my 620 folders. Bringing a tripod or hunting for an unobstructed parking meter as stable base has been the bane of my existence during my nightly photo sessions.
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02.21.08
Posted in Photography at 11:35 pm by thomas
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of my favorite places along the California Coast. It’s amazing how much thought has been put into making this one of the great museums of the world. The sheer amount of content within its walls is staggering. You could easily spend a day just reading all the panels and signs – but then you’d be missing the exhibits!
Both Kazumi’s and my most favorite area is the Jelly Fish section of the aquarium. The Jellies are gorgeous and the presentation is breathtaking: Large, deep blue tanks in which the Jellies are forever floating down against the movement of the water.
Taken with our Canon S2IS at a rather high ISO setting. Click for a larger version.
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02.20.08
Posted in Photography at 10:56 pm by thomas
My parents are currently visiting and we took them up to Napa on a daytrip to some of the wineries.
We’ve been to Napa many times, but this must have been the first time for us early in the year and we were not prepared for how glorious the rapeseed is blooming all over the valley. All of Napa is an explosion of yellow flowers, and the fog early that day added a very nice quiet note to the pictures.
Taken with our Canon S2IS. Click for a larger version.
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02.18.08
Posted in Photography at 11:06 pm by thomas
Another shot taken with my Kodak Retinette 1A on TMax 3200. This camera has a f2.8 aperture and so it is barely possible to do handheld no-flash night shots with fast film like this. I love the graininess of the resulting prints quite a lot, so don’t be surprised if there are going to be more shots like this.
As always, click the photo for a larger version.
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02.16.08
Posted in Photography at 10:14 pm by thomas
San Francisco is blessed with hundreds of little convenience stores and there is barely a block that doesn’t have its own. Many of them are open late and they are often the last hope when the there are more party guests than expected or when that one crucial ingredient is running out while cooking late.
I love those little stores, each with their own personality and idiosyncratic shelfing systems, and I’ve often tried to take photos of them, but I’ve found it very hard to take pictures that capture their unique presence.
Here’s a photo of a rather large convenience store on Columbus near Jones late one night on my way home from work. I took this shot with the Kodak Retinette 1A loaded with Kodak TMax 3200 film – a first for this camera that I had kept on a steady diet of color film for the last two years.
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02.14.08
Posted in Good Stuff, Photography at 12:37 am by thomas
Walking to work and home is some of the best time of my everyday life here in San Francisco. Our company moved offices last year and my commute has been drastically extended – from about 1.5 kilometers one-way to more than 3 kilometers one-way.
I now walk every day across Nob Hill, parts of Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill, with smaller parts of North Beach, Chinatown and Fishermen’s Wharf thrown in. Yes, I know I am a lucky bastard.
My walk usually takes about 45 minutes, and so for a total of about one and a half hours every day I can feel the pulse of the city.
The neighborhoods wake up every morning as the fog slowly moves off the hills as if the city is rolling back the night blanket for the day. House managers are hosing down the sidewalks, the garbage collectors methodically go along the blocks. There’s people walking their dogs, jogging or going to work. With the first rays of the sun the old Victorians are splendid in their pastel colors.
Muni buses full of bleary workers roar across the hills, their warning beeps and mechanical announcements breaking the silence of the residential streets around Russian Hill.
The pigeons are usually still asleep along the edges of the roofs, while the seagulls circle near the Bay and the noisy swarms of parrots come over from Telegraph Hill for their morning trip to Russian Hill and beyond to the trees near the Marina. The sky clears up once the fog is gone, revealing the bluest of blue sky you can imagine. Life is good.
Then in the evenings on my way back up across the hills, San Francisco is aglow in the last light of the sun coming in across the Golden Gate Bridge. Everywhere in North Beach the restaurants and cafes are bustling with people, while a few blocks further up, Chinatown slowly comes to rest, with grocery stores clearing the sidewalks and metal shutters rattling down for the night.
When it is fully dark and the fog returns to the Bay, you can hear the fog horns all the way from the Golden Gate Bridge and nearer from Alcatraz, a sad booing sound that echoes across most of the city and can often even be heard near downtown. When I get to our doorstep it is often just about when the cold wind from the ocean reaches our area and it is time to stay warm indoors for the night.
I very much love this daily rhythm, and I’ve just found a website that shows you pretty well what I’m talking about: Hi-Def San Francisco is a very single-minded site – it’s a live webcam from across the Bay in Sausolito that automatically creates a daily midnight-to-midnight time-lapse movie of the skyline of San Francisco where you can follow the daily cycle of our great city in about two minutes.
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02.03.08
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff at 12:56 am by thomas
The always excellent and interesting Telstar Logistics site has a great article about the vintage San Francisco streetcars and the people who keep them going.
San Francisco’s F Line streetcars can be seen in their vintage color schemes all across downtown on Market street and along the piers on Embarcadero all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf. The colorful streetcars were built between the 1890s and the 1940s and they are all lovingly restored in original color schemes from cities all around the world.
It’s fun to watch tourists when they realize that the city has not just the only working cable car system in the world, but in addition has this multicolored fleet of hundred-year-old streetcars in active duty on its streets.
I always enjoy riding these clattering and shaking rail cars. The interiors are at least as interesting and beautiful as the paint jobs and it’s fun to imagine for a moment that the very car you are in once rolled through Brooklyn, Milan or Kobe.
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