Dawn & Wires

The local outside world has been dominated for many recent mornings by sincerely falling rain, but Christmas Eve dawned clear and cold. The Castro of course was all but deserted at such an unholy hour, and it is surely more fun to take pictures when the streets are not full of nasty-looking cars.

Daylight Arriving

Early Sunday morning outside the laundromat (looking down Church Street toward 18th) there was a clean demarcation (just for a moment) between retreating night and advancing day. Then for another moment they blended. After that daylight prevailed, of course.

Church & 17th

The surface of the street at Church & 17th outside the laundromat early Sunday morning.

Birthday Present Preview

I finished shopping for Mabel Watson Payne's birthday presents over the weekend. None too soon either, since the big day is rushing toward us this Tuesday (though the party in Golden Gate Park will not take place until Saturday). When asked, Mabel told me and told her parents on several different occasions that she wanted a backpack all her own (Daddy and Mamma share a nifty blue one and Grandpa is never seen without his utilitarian big black one – the latter functioning something like Santa Claus's magic sack, as a frequent source of little gifts). This explicit wish on Mabel's part made me very glad to find this quite small blazing yellow lightweight rectangular backpack at Cliff's this weekend. My favorite Castro variety store was also where I got seduced by the above-pictured toys – to be discovered disguised as tissue-paper bundles inside the yellow backpack when Mabel opens it.

Gifts of clothing predominate this year, as usual, in spite of the backpack-indulgence. And this year I remembered to take fashion-photos just before wrapping, because in the chaos of unwrapping there will be little or no chance to show what the garments look like. 

The brightly figured tissue paper, matte blue wrapping paper and tangerine satin ribbon all came from Flax, as did the blank card with built-in pocket for insertion of personal photograph to define and decorate the front. 

Corona Heights

1/400 second, f/16, ISO 320

1/80 second, f/16, ISO 160

1/60 second, f/16, ISO 160

I took the new camera manual along this morning for something to read while doing laundry and opened it by chance to a passage about taking landscape pictures using a small aperture with a slow shutter speed to get the deepest range of focus. This was something I had not yet thought to try. So far, I only have one lens for the D-SLR and it does not zoom and is not wide-angle. Those functions are planned for additional lenses to come later, after I have learned better how to use the fixed 50 mm lens that was recommended to me as the proper one to start with. So I seem to have assumed I could not do distant views of anything with this humble starter-lens, and the manual was admonishing me not to make that assumption.

1/80 second, f/16, ISO 160

Early in the afternoon I climbed up to Corona Heights, an open hilltop of rock and grass high above the Castro. The sky was full of dramatic contrasts as the rainclouds from yesterday made their slow departure, so I was hoping for somewhat better pictures than I got. But the manual was right about the tiny aperture and the distant focus, which was pretty good. What wasn't so good? The only shots I even halfway liked back at home were the few I had slightly underexposed on purpose (remembering the workshop advice about "bracketing"). Maybe because there was so much sky around, the internal meter kept telling me to let in more light than it turned out I really wanted. So these San Francisco views might have been richer and more various if I had speeded up the shutter more often, instead of slowing it down.

Join the Red Cross

Popular illustrator Harrison Fisher (1877-1934) created this Gibson Girl/Nurse for a Red Cross print campaign in 1917. The original was scanned at the Library of Congress, where they include this full-frame version on their web site. Somehow the beat-up Kodak color-range cardboards against the matte black background (and the casual crookedness of the whole arrangement) create a graphic whole more mysterious and effective than the sum of the parts.

Today while doing errands at the bank and the post office and at Cliff's in the Castro (in the rain) I kept passing and re-passing various damp young people with big smiles huddled under awnings clutching clipboards and hoping to sign people up as member of (and donors to) the Red Cross. Clipboard-kids have proliferated over the last few years to such an extent both in the Inner Mission and in the Castro (friendly, youthful, affluent neighborhoods with lots of foot traffic) that they have become kind of invisible, like fire hydrants. Which means they must constantly reach for new extremes of chirpiness and eagerness just to attract anybody's attention.



The internet tells me they are chuggers (short for charity mugger). That terminology sounds unnecessarily nasty to me. It's not like they do it for fun, or like there are all kinds of better jobs available for the young. What I mostly felt was sorry for them (though not sorry enough to do what they wanted and stop). But as I went on my way it made me wonder if I had ever worked a job as horrible as theirs appeared to be (especially in the rain).

Only maybe that one time when I was a teenage busboy in a country-western supper club out in the middle of nowhere. I tripped about halfway through my first night and spilled a ten-gallon bucket full of miniature ice cubes all the way across the dance floor. It was like a piece of performance art, the coverage was so beautifully even and so extensive. But that job only lasted a week so I don't think it really counts.

Lightpole Advertising

This morning in the Castro I found this flyer taped to a lightpole, such a great piece of anonymous typography that it caused me almost to wish for the days when I considered it both possible and fun to go out to a San Francisco club at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night (and you know the HONEYSOUNDSYSTEM will never start making its honey sounds at Holy Cow any earlier than that). Unless readers have extremely sharp eyes the full text of this piece will only reveal itself clicked up to large (though not everybody is clicking any more – I see that about 25% of my readers look at this thing on their phones now).

Walk in the Hills

I wanted to be outdoors this afternoon while the sun was shining and decided to walk up into the steep residential hills behind Dolores Park. The pictures above go to illustrate that the higher into the hills you go, the greater the share of San Francisco houses that retain their original fittings and ornaments.



I had never noticed this particular public stairway before. The sidewalk/path it led to ran for one long block above a roadway too narrow to allow for a regular sidewalk. Conception and styling proclaimed WPA influence.






There was a strip of ground about fifteen feet wide running between the path and the edge of the embankment. The residents appeared to treat this space as an extended common garden, with some spots individualized a bit in front of particular houses. Below, I admired a series of round stone markers flat on the ground like stepping stones, each with a single name carved.








At first, I thought each stone represented a child or a family member, but gradually it came to seem likelier that the names commemorated dead dogs or cats.




I was sorry to reach the top of the path and find myself obliged to re-enter the ordinary world. How homey and humble these multi-million dollar houses and their environs look, up close.



Had expected more of that bright clear sunshine today that we usually get after several days of rain, but the sky looked mostly hazy and colorless as can be seen below. This is what I saw coming down the hill with Eureka Valley spread out below including the great big gay flag erected some years ago by a grateful city. Castro Street runs from the lower right corner upward toward the middle of the strip of blurry grey sky.

Castro Wisteria

Overcast afternoon, rain imminent, more like lingering winter than springtime. Walking home with parcels from the Castro, I took an unfamiliar side street and encountered this purple vision.




Often it comes as a surprise to me that the colors in flowers rise up better in photographs taken on cloudy or foggy San Francisco days. Bright sunny weather would seem like the best light for flowers, but in fact it tends as often as not to wash them out. With wisteria this must be especially true, where each spray contains about 27 subtle gradations in shade and intensity.

Mr. Practical

Went out in the bright afternoon to run many travel-related errands, partly in the Castro and partly in the Mission (warning people at the bank that I would soon be hitting the ATM machines in Rome with sincere frequency – redeeming many lightweight sweaters from the dry cleaner – buying a disgraceful number of vanilla-almond protein bars at the supermarket – etcetera).






I deliberately walked on back streets to get from errand-site to errand-site, entertaining myself with picture-taking. And the San Francisco sunlight gradually faded as my practical accomplishments piled up.