Showing posts with label Financial District. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Financial District. Show all posts

Sunday, October 18, 2009

streetwise.....

.... things are always changing, and no matter what your destiny holds for you, each day brings new surprises for us all. I love being on the street, and hate to be closed in as has happened to me various times in my life, and even voluntarily when I have so much work to do on this computer before I leave in just a few months.

To help in taking a break from all the sitting, I had an opportunity to take a short cruise aboard the USS Potomac, formerly used as the presidential yacht of President Franklin D Roosevelt. A gorgeous ship, it's now touring around the bay waters from its Oakland home-base, and educating guests of the fine FDR legacy. Also during Fleet Week there are always some participating naval ships inport for general tours, and this year it included two Canadian naval vessels, two Coast Guard cutters and one US naval ship: USS Green Bay (LPH-20). Very new - just a year commissioned so I made it a point to visit before they departed. Wow, am I ever so surprised by how the Navy has adjusted to the new technologies available. I wish I could've seen the sleeping quarters also, but I know those areas are closed during inport tours.The navigational bridge ~ where the steering and navigation of the ship is conducted ~ seemed to me the most interesting area... no longer are circular radar screens used but now square computer screens! Wow!! Most of the duties I previous had in plotting and manually computing approaches and collisions to objects and/or vessels are all now computerized and done in seconds with a higher degree of accuracy!
Streetwise, there are surprises that abound around us as we traverse those concrete halls throughout the our cities, IF we elect to see. Recently with a friend, I went walking around the San Francisco Embarcadero and the Financial District and saw things I haven't seen on previous occasions.... I was walked toward the corner of Spear and Howard Streets, where my friend told me she had read somewhere that there is a statue of a tourist with a camera. When we reached that corner, I realized I had passed this corner many times, and don't recall not one statue. The address was for the Folger Coffee Company Building.... among the people outside and passing by, we did not see not one statue that looked like a tourist, let alone holding a camera. Walking around the building, we noticed a small side sidewalk lined with steel benches on Howard that lead to a small plaza.... walking slowing down this area were people sitting and enjoying a snack or a late lunch, talking on cell phones or (yuck) smoking... and as I moved further into this shadow-darkened walkway, noticed a couple sitting on the first bench, which turned out to be a statue of a couple, complete with a purse on the bench. Around the corner was the tourist permanently implanted in his footsteps with rock-steady outstretched arm pointed out, steadily diercting a friend on how to stand or where to look, while a oldtime Instamatic camera held with the other hand.Wow, I've never even seen these "people", let alone the the walkway they are located in, though I'd passed through this intersection many times. Instead I am always with eyes skyward, neck aching as I snap the huge and reflective skyscrapers.

As this day ended, the fog started to sneak in... smooth and silky, this was a change from the usual cottony fog I have seen on other occasions. It was gorgeous and reminded me of fog in my youth.... some things never change.

I often have to look elsewhere in order to see changes in my environment, which opens my eyes to new sights.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

the Valley of Glass

It's not too often I get a chance to walk in the City any longer. When I lived in Spain I used to walk about seven miles in less than a week and now, I don't even make five miles in a month let alone two. I used to walk every week when I first arrived, but that's before I started madly snapping everything in sight of my great gorgeous hometown, and now I have thousands of image files. It seems the only walking I get to do now is when I grab that old magic-box and go somewhere to take pictures! More often than not, at some stage of taking pictures, I will run - for a position, to get a camera, to use the tripod, etc... you get the picture.

I now practically spend all day on the computer, organizing my files - an endless project as each week I create newer files to add to the pile. Right now I've been spending the past few days moving all of my older 2008 image files to an external hard drive, archiving the old while making room for the newer 2009 files yet to be created. There's a lot of files to organize and archive, 190gigs at last count and growing as I find lost files hidden in some obscure folder as I ran out of room on my 160gig internal hard drive on the desktop. What I am doing now and the constant changes to improve my filing and down- and up-loading influences how I now download to the desktop and later archive.... I've been filing my imagery as negatives and now digital files for over 30 years, and along with a folder under every theme and subject matter to make filing and future retrieval very easy, I've changed the matter in which I date my folders and it just again changed some months ago.

A few weeks by chance I met a North Beach neighbor as I was returning from shooting the sunset at the top of Lombard Street, and we spoke and exchanged website addresses. We've spoken a few times online and today went together on a short two-hour walk from North Beach toward the Financial District....

It was a very leisurely walk at a nice relaxing pace, and talking as we walked, reminded me of a time looong ago in Spain when I would get together with spanish friends on short foto trips.... Except for that time, almost all of my life behind a camera has been quite solitary - not that I mind... It's strange to be with someone, even another photographer, when almost all your life behind the camera (and in my case it's been over 35 years of being a magic-box operator) and in studios, location shoots, weddings and all sorts of environmental portraiture, I have been alone. So today was a unique day.....

The first thing I noticed right off was that being Sunday, the grand masses of people mixed with tourists and frantic bankers (ok, jes kidding) were nowhere to be seen. The streets once we passed through Chinatown were basically empty as compared to the normal weekday chaos. It was actually a welcome silence except for the few cars traveling through these streets and of course: the clang and historic rumble of the cable cars.

I love the architecture of the City and though it's quite different from the centuries-old architecture of Europe and my familiar Spain, what the City offers is no simple sand-dune sculpture!
I don't drive through the Financial District often but the few days I do, you can recognize me easily: head and eyes looking up from the depths of the Valley of Glass, eyeing this and that, and even sometimes grabbing a camera - or cell phone - and snapping a few quick images of the great scenics the downtown offers. I love the huge glass windows but I also love the tall seemingly endless climb to the sky the building perspective offers. But what intrigues me most are the gorgeous reflections spied that is displayed from the glass.... it's to die for!!!

On foot and with camera in hand, I can spend time to catch little details I wouldn't otherwise see from a moving car... and I love the details in the downtown. To see the differences between a buildings dating back several life generations, then to see the comparsion with a nearby glass building is something so beautiful yet strange, is to invoke a sense of madness in the modern architects, wondering what they must have thought when designing something so far-fetched and in what seems a modern-day struggle for slim lines and out with the detailed and beautiful yesteryear architecture that I love and appreciate.

Sigh....

So, the next time you want to celebrate Spring, go out to the downtown area... you'll be looking both UP and in front.... and you'll be pleasantly surprises at the eye treasures you'll find in the Valley of Glass in San Francisco!

Thanks
to teamuck for her company and if you'd like to see some of her images, you'll enjoy her great flora imagery!