04.30.08
Posted in Photography at 10:42 pm by thomas
On my way home tonight I was walking along Polk Street with the golden rays of the evening sun lancing down between the buildings. On Lombard I turned left and went half a block up the very steep Russian Hill to get a better view.
This is what I saw when I turned around.
A busy evening on Lombard with waves of gold flooding across the trees of the Presidio.
Taken with our Canon S2IS, which seems to have taken up permanent residence in my backpack. Click for a larger view.
Crossposted to MapSkip
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04.28.08
Posted in Photography at 10:58 pm by thomas
San Francisco would not be San Francisco without its hills. No matter where in the city you are, there is always a breathtaking view only a few blocks away, and often even locals are surprised when they look down a street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. There is always the moment when one nods and says: “Ah – so that’s what it looks like from over here!”
When I came to San Francisco in the early nineties as a tourist, I would spend days just walking up and down across the hills of this beautiful city, aimlessly getting lost and being supremely happy about it. And even now after living here for almost ten years I still can fill a whole Sunday just wandering around, zig-zagging across the neighborhoods, from one hill-top park to the next.
Here’s a typical view from Pacific Heights across Van Ness and Polk streets towards Nob Hill in the east. Sacramento street drops dramatically from the top of the hill down into Polk Gulch, with the westbound #1 Muni bus stopping at every corner – a necessity in a city where elderly citizens often can not walk up or down the block they are living on.
This shot was taken with the Canon S2IS with its very long digital zoom, and I’m very pleased with the shortened perspective the zoom creates. It turns all the pastel colored buildings on the hill into a two-dimensional pattern with the street rising straight up between them.
Crossposted to MapSkip
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04.26.08
Posted in Photography at 9:52 pm by thomas
The Little City Market has been in business for over sixty years and it reminds me of the butcher shops in my hometown back in Germany. It’s a very traditional store and it shows its colors with pride – especially after business hours, when the red glow emanating from its windows lights up Stockton Street.
We had some rain a few days ago and I had this place on my list of photo subjects for just such an evening…
Taken with our Canon S2IS – click the photo for a large version.
Crossposted to MapSkip
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04.23.08
Posted in Photography at 11:30 pm by thomas
Yesterday we had our first rainy day in April here in San Francisco – well, really only a few drizzly showers in the afternoon and evening. I had been busy at work and didn’t realize that it had been raining until I left the office and I was glad I had brought a camera, since there were a few spots I had in mind for some wet-asphalt-in-the-night shots…
I walked up along Stockton and it started to rain again just when I got to Broadway. A man in a dark suit came out of a Chinese restaurant and he ran across Broadway just when I hit the shutter…
Shot with a Canon S2IS at ISO 200. Click the photo for a large version.
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04.17.08
Posted in Photography at 9:44 pm by thomas
On one of my routes to work I walk through what was once called the Latin Quarter, that then became the Italian District and is now known as North Beach.
I just recently learned that this was once the Latin Quarter when I was reading a book with anecdotes from San Francisco by Almira Bailey. She wrote about the life in this city in 1921 and she was still using Latin Quarter as the name for what was then already a predominantly Italian neighborhood.
I usually cross Columbus on Stockton and walk up Telegraph Hill past the groups of elderly Chinese that dominate Washington Square in the mornings with their exercises. Their rhythmic shouts of “Yi – Er – San – Si” are now part of my daily morning walk, as are the tourists lining up at Mama’s Cafe for breakfast and the fire fighters of Station 28 preparing their equipment in front of the fire station.
Just when I pass the fire station, at the highest point of Stockton Street, I’ve noticed a very peculiar thing about the view of Stockton Street to the south – since the street rises at a gentle grade up to the Stockton Tunnel, you can take a picture of all of Stockton street from Columbus to Sacramento, a distance of seven blocks.
Here is the picture as it appears with my Canon S2IS with its large zoom. Seven blocks of Stockton all the way across Chinatown compressed into one shot.
Crossposted to MapSkip
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04.16.08
Posted in Media, Photography, San Francisco History at 11:04 pm by thomas
I’ve been talking about vintage MJB Coffee ads in San Francisco before, and while I was researching that blog post back then I remember seeing references to a second “Why” ad in San Francisco, but I could never find an address for it.
A few weeks ago that problem solved itself when I was walking along Columbus Avenue and just happened to look up at the houses across the street from the City Lights bookstore.
The two ads happen to be only about six blocks from each other – the first ad is on Clay just above Stockton and this one is on Columbus and Kerouac Alley.
The two ads look similar, but this one on Columbus seems to be a little bit less elaborate in the painting style. It is known that these ads were painted around 1906 and it must have been after the earthquake, since both houses are in an area were barely a wall survived the earthquake and firestorm of 1906.
I’m still looking for a well-rounded explanation for the message of this ad campaign. MJB Coffee – WHY? sounds very much like it is only one half of a more complex ad message. Was this supported by newspaper ads or billboards? Was there a little story around this ad on the tin cans the coffee came in? Inquiring minds would like to know…
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04.14.08
Posted in Good Stuff, Navel Gazing at 11:07 pm by thomas
This is my 400th post on Pacific Tides!
It’s quite amazing – I would have not expected to be able to keep this blog going for so long (the blog is now just a month shy of 5 years old) at a pretty steady rate of at least one blog post every week, and often two or three.
Originally, the idea was to add to the growing wave of outrage around the beginning of the Iraq war. I didn’t really have much of an idea what else I would post here (and there was no shortage of outrage!), but just by its existence, Pacific Tides has forced me to come back again and again and to put my thoughts into words.
I’m glad I started the blog and kept going with it, not just as some newfangled form of self expression, but much more because of you, the readers. And I’m very thankful for all the great reader comments and emails that I have received over the years and it’s still a thrill to check the statistics for the site and to see a steady stream of users from all over the world pouring into the site.
Welcome again, everybody! Just stick around for a little while, blog posts are bound to happen every 4.48 days!
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Posted in Photography at 10:30 pm by thomas
In late March 2008 at the Maritime Historical Park in San Francisco: The square-rigger Balclutha (1886) and steam tug Eppleton Hall (1914). Taken with my Kodak Vigilant Six-20 f6.3 (1946).
I’m very fond of this picture since it is so very timeless… nothing even hints at when this photo was taken. It’s very fitting that even the camera that captured this image is already more than six decades old.
After running several rolls through the Vigilant with the f6.3 lens, I have to say I’m slightly disappointed that I can’t see the slightest difference to the f8.8 lens on my first Vigilant. If anything, I’ve had more luck with the f8.8. A little bit puzzling, that. I almost feel I have to bring both cameras along and shoot side-by-side to resolve the question.
The Maritime Historical Park is highly under-appreciated – it is a wonderful collection of the seafaring tradition of San Francisco and the West Coast. If you have a few hours on a lazy weekend in town, check out the park with its great collection of ships.
Crossposted to MapSkip
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04.06.08
Posted in Modern Life, Navel Gazing, Photography at 8:34 pm by thomas
I’ve started posting photos from this blog on Flickr.
Not sure yet how to handle this, since I will definitely always post my best shots here first, but I guess I will every now and then upload a batch of photos on Flickr, since after all it is a huge community and I want to expose my photos to as large an audience as possible.
I’m definitely too lazy to add long descriptions to the Flickr set, so if you want to hear the story behind the pictures, you’ll always have to come here – or to MapSkip, come to think of it… 
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04.01.08
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life at 10:57 pm by thomas
Since I have been talking before about the MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane it’s not much of a secret anymore that I like to fly virtual airplanes. And as I’ve pointed out, the switch to a Mac as my home machine has robbed me of the one and only Microsoft application that I use with quite some enthusiasm – yes, it’s true, I was missing Flight Simulator.
But now there is a solution for my problem: VMware Fusion for the Mac is one cool application. I’ve been using VMware products for years at work, but I knew that without DirectX support there is no way to play games on the PC. But Fusion comes in its latest version with “experimental” support for DirectX 9 and I just had to try…
Yes – Fusion ran the installer for FS9 without a problem on a fresh install of Win2k and once installed, Flight Simulator runs easily good enough on my Dual Core Mac Mini to fly. It took a little while to balance the main memory of the virtual machine with the scenery complexity, but I’m getting the 3D clouds, mid-range scenery settings and real-time weather and the flights are smooth.
Flying virtual airplanes on a virtual computer…
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