Laundromat Perspectives

Standing outside my preferred neighborhood laundromat on Church Street at 7:30 Sunday morning, these were the views in immediate camera range. Overhead tram lines, new paint job, tiled tower, black-and-white fire hydrant and a distant sliver of Dolores Park.

March Rain

1/100 second, f/16

Downtown San Francisco from Dolores Park in the rain in March. This is a 50 mm f/1.4 prime lens (without a zoom). When I got back from the library in the afternoon it was just starting to rain and the light looked different from any that I had tried so far with this new camera. I grabbed it and went back out in a hurry while the rain was still just getting started, vowing to be cautious about getting the precious gadget wet. These were all taken at ISO 500 in and around the park, mostly from underneath the shelter of trees.

1/160 second, f/16

The little tower (above) belongs to Mission High School, across the street from the park. The architecture of that high school is hard to describe. Colonial Baroque Moorish.

1/50 second, f/16

1/40 second, f/16

The Christian Science dome again, gleaming wet this time.

1/60 second, f/16

1/80 second, f/16

1/80 second, f/16

1/30 second, f/16

Shutter Priority

For the next shutter priority experiment I decided to use this clump of low-growing palm trees as backdrop. I started out with long exposures to see if the occasional people walking past would make a satisfying blur. But in daylight, the long exposure (with shutter priority alone) admitted too much light and washed out everything.




So I gradually shortened the shutter time until I found a balance where I could not let in too much light and still could more-or-less stop motion.






This technique is intended for later use with Mabel Watson Payne under playground conditions.

Winter Roses

Mainly I was up in the hills above Dolores Park to look at the rain clouds moving rapidly across San Francisco from the ocean, since everyone says a new storm is shaping itself over our heads, but the first thing that grabbed my actual attention was down on the ground and it was these roses, never trimmed, never pruned, still blooming away as if last year's proper season for this kind of activity had not ended several months ago.





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Mission Palms

It was a day for palm trees. First I saw these running up the middle of Dolores in the fog when I went out early to buy provisions and restock the cupboards after all the Christmas revelry.



Many hours later I was returning from a walk in the hills and cut through Dolores Park. There in the fading light of late afternoon I encountered a whole other equally insistent population of palm trees and my San Francisco day seemed to have come full circle.




The best palm tree pictures I ever took are the ones below, first posted here in February 2009. My daughter and son-in-law had just given me a blue plastic Diana pinhole camera for my birthday and I was trying it out in the spirit of a new toy. Very much like a new toy, because like a child I soon lost interest in it. But now am forced to face the fact that continuing with lomography would have been a good creative thing to do and I ought to go back to it.

Colonial Baroque

San Francisco's Mission High School, a building that will soon be a century old. It was constructed in the same molded-concrete Colonial Baroque style as Mission Dolores Basilica two blocks away.






This squat tower crowns the old Industrial Arts wing of the building. Its glazed tiles and miniature balconies seem to imply a purpose, but apparently it never had one – except to serve as a pigeon roost.




Across from the high school is the open expanse of Dolores Park – seen here near sunset (with an unfortunate skyline behind, marred by smog). People and pets abound. Personally I have learned to avoid sitting down here – for fear of the all-pervasive dog shit – but nobody else seems to be bothered by it.

Sunday School

CHILDREN UP TO THE AGE OF TWENTY

WELCOME

Hand-lettered sign affixed long ago to the abandoned Christian Science church opposite Dolores Park in San Francisco.

Mission Scenery

Unlikely arrangement of planter boxes along the roof line of a small business in the Mission engaged in the marketing of cremations. The bright wispy grasses must be emblems for ascending souls.



Details of a freshly painted mural expressing neighborhood patriotism in one of the alleys (I forget which) parallel to Guerrero out around 20th.



Without lucky shadows it might be difficult to make visual claims for either the beat-up cactus protruding through its bars or for the curlicue numbers tacked to a wooden board.



In Dolores Park this more-than-life-sized statue presides from a height. Its plinth reads: Miguel Hidalgo, Libertador de Mexico, 1810. The land where San Francisco is located now was barely inhabited in 1810. Only the Mission existed then, housing a few missionary priests from Spain and their "acolytes" (those indigenous people who could be recruited, and who died in great numbers from European diseases). The U.S. government had not yet fulfilled its manifest destiny and seized this part of the world from the Mexican government.

The statue came later, long after the thinly-justified American conquest had become an established fact.