207 | View from the Stick

1982. | San Diego

I was much younger here, and don’t remember being too anxious climbing up to this vantage, though it was difficult to maintain ‘one hand for yourself, one hand for the ship’ while holding a camera.

What was scary though, was that shortly before this, I had stepped out from the bridge and onto the narrow upper deck and heard a single steel-on-steel clunk. I thought “What was that?” then looked down to see my trusty solid Nikon S2 lying at my feet. I had trussed the camera differently over my soulder to squeeze through the hatch, and it was merely resting on my camera bag, its strap untensioned. That would have made a wonderful splash, and I’m sure I would have heard that, timed perfectly with gravity’s acceleration after the clunk.

206 | Christening

1982 | San Diego

The crew had done up a fine surprise for the moment the seiner slid down the ways. I remember my graduate advisor Newton Harrison was there; I had not seen him in the years after my time at UCSD as his studio assistant. I recall the time I sneaked into his office and installed giant covers on his light switches and even bigger trim plates for the wall outlets.

After admiring and taking in the color and cacophony of the fireworks at this launch, Newton turned to me with a big grin and said, “This is the best opening I’ve been to in a long time.”

205 | Fall Color

2021 | Along the Los Angeles River, Burbank

The day before Christmas had a lot of moving parts; for a COVID-season small family gathering in a big open kitchen, we were each preparing a non-traditional dish or a transformational update to old favorites. I had forgotten to buy tart apples and chicken broth, and on our walk just after a good rain, the going was gooey and slippery in most places even with the right boots, so my attention was on my feet.

But in the midst of all this, stopping here cleared my mind entirely; this picture is evidence of my best non-thinking on that busy day.

204 | Out to Lunch

2010 | Ocean Beach, San Diego County, California

The photographers I know gravitate to Ortega’s Cafe. It used to be just four tight booths and a few stools, but when the storefront next door became available, they blew through the wall and reworked a bright and comfortable space for many more patrons, and they were miraculously serving again after just a few days’ downtime.

My favorite dish is not always on offer, but you might imagine a very thin and broad slice of lightly-fried eggplant wrapped around mahi-mahi and its trimmings for a remarkable enchilada. No tortilla!

▷ The rest room is very clean and was always charming, but sadly the column was removed; I guess they thought it superfluous, as it wasn’t load-bearing.

203 | Straight View

I’ve barely begun to use the iPhone camera properly. Computational photography produces a remarkably natural seen-with-my-eye image. If I put my tiny lens in the right place, and stop worrying about just the right amount of polarizing, which values might be washed away or closed out, whether the layers will be resolved, and look carefully, my phone looks far more carefully and brings it all home.

▷ And this isn’t even the further improved latest model of the camera-phone.

202 | Alfred Pagano

2010 | San Diego Natural History Museum

Alfred made amazing murals, sometimes out of wildly incompatible files – I remember one time he received an old halftone color postcard of a local beach character from the client and somehow made a nice life-sized free-standing mounted cutout. The one pictured here started out finer and ended up spectacular.

When anyone came in and asked “Can you print this?” his answer was always “How big?”