2016 | Ocean Beach
150 | Unnamed Creek
2021 | Marin County
I have been exploring these woods all my life, and I have been photographing in this particular canyon for forty years, but only recently have I felt that I may be coming to know it.
149 | Staging
1977 | Coronado, California
148 | Red Hill Camp
1981 | Salton Sea, Southeast Shore
For many years, I could choose between Kodachrome (by then, readily available only in 35mm for still cameras) or Ektachrome (still produced in larger formats as well) for transparencies. One was contrasty and saturated, hitting the reds hard. The other, smoother but much cooler, seemed insanely blue to me. Making reversal prints from either film was never easy, copying to intermediate negatives was troublesome, and dye transfers were lovely but priced far out of reach.
My 6x9cm water survey transparencies sat for thirty-five years, and when I came to digitize them, I was able to build a more neutral look by pushing the red channel to get a real picture, one not so much about the photographer’s process, but very much about this photographer’s experience.
▷ You could look up the development history of Kodachrome. Seemingly minor characters facilitated important connections. Mannes and Godowsky, working independently, added momentum, and later with support, broke through – a fascinating look into the musicians’ minds. (Yes, that’s what I meant to write.)
147 | Canebrake
1999 | San Diego County
My friend John’s desert cabin stands on the last parcel of land adjacent to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, so there were a few strands of barbed wire to show the border where over 585,000 acres of public-access lands began. I remember that the road up the alluvial fan to this sparse ‘neighborhood’ was good, though we had to engage four-wheel drive at the last turn to make the last few deeply sandy feet up to the cabin.
It had indoor plumbing by this time, but the original privy was still standing. As I look at this picture now, I wonder what are the characteristics which distinguish an architectural ‘ruin.’
146 | Closing Down
1977 | Del Mar, San Diego County Fair
145 | Summer Begins
1977 | La Jolla
144 | A Father's Day
1978 | La Jolla Shores
143 | The Streets of San Francisco
1976 | San Francisco
My friend Tom wanted to show off his recently-restored Sunbeam Tiger, with fresh engine and Ferrari-red finish. It was impressive, with reverberant exhaust and firm suspension, up to a point. Tom was channeling Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt, hauling through the city’s narrow streets over the tall hills. He wasn’t ready to slow down, and I wasn’t ready to die, so I picked up my camera to amuse myself as well as I could. At a level of white-knuckle discomfort that I would call fear, I was able to relax my hand and eye and let them do their best work at 1/500th of a second.
▷ The Sunbeam Alpine was a modestly peppy two-seat, four-cylinder sports roadster, which via some design work by Carroll Shelby, was produced as the vigorous V8-powered Tiger. Better known is Shelby’s earlier sleek yet brutish Cobra, with an even bigger V8 shoehorned into the original six-cylinder AC Ace.
▷▷ Frank Bullitt drove a different make. You might enjoy the movie.
142 | Opportunity
1977 | La Jolla, California
Different viewers access photographs in completely different ways. Many people in the business have, to my eye, strange frames of reference. Photographers’ stories about being misunderstood can be breathtaking, and might even be maddening except for the great pleasure that we in the guild receive from the evidence of our best efforts.
This picture was picked out for comment by a gallerist as a “lucky shot.” Yes, I am lucky to be alive, lucky to be mobile with good vision, but I claim a certain commitment to practice and alertness which make incidental gifts of pictures like this within my grasp. People wiser than me advise those who wish for luck in a lottery to engage in the process and buy a ticket.