it’s something…

I know that some of you have stated in the past something to the effect of “I don’t like black and white pictures”. Personally I have a hard time understanding how someone could feel this way. See now with movies I can see where not liking B&W might have some foundation. However I think that the bias is due to the content not that it is B&W. Let me explain…for the most part B&W movies are old, like really old, and movies that old don’t have any relevance to today. Of course there are exceptions, but you have to admit that most old movies suck ass by today’s standards.

I can’t figure anyway to extend this same kind of logic to a still photo. I love pictures with brilliant, vibrant, vivid colors, but a well shot B&W is or can be…so much more powerful. It could be that I have always admired Ansel Adams, and he is known for B&W. He did publish some color pictures, but he is known for the B&W’s. So maybe by studying his pictures and developing an understanding for what he was accomplishing, I have developed a greater appreciation for B&W than the average person.

If you look at an Adams’ pic you should notice that the important details of the picture are middle grays with tones extending in both directions all the way to black on one side and white on the other. To achieve this with film took an incredible understanding of your film and the development process. Fortunately with digital darkrooms it is possible for an average photographer to achieve Adam’s like images. I don’t think I am there yet, but I like this picture anyway.

I will be honest, for some reason I am very tired tonight and don’t feel much like writing. However I did get out to take a few pics this evening so at least I have a picture to post. To get this shot I actually had to lay on the ground and look through the view finder. On top of that it was a real pain in the ass because the fucking wind kept moving the fucking flowers around and since it was dusk the shutter speed was a bit slow…in other words I managed to capture about 600 pictures of orange blurs…

I suck. I didn’t take any pictures today, so in other words I don’t have anything to post. So I am going to borrow a cool picture from someone else to share with you.

My friend Jen took this picture from her hotel room in ATL (that is Atlanta for all of you that are airport code challenged). She doesn’t have a tripod with her so she just set the camera on the window sill and snapped the picture. The streak of light running across the picture is an airplane taking off. Pretty neat huh?

She has some other cool pics that you might enjoy also…http://flickr.com/photos/mysgyn/

I didn’t really get out to do any shooting today. I went to see the Bourne movie. It is really good, if you like this type of movie and or have seen the first two Bourne movies, you won’t be disappointed with this one. OH! One of the trailers they showed is for a movie where Tom Cruise plays an ass…might not have been too much of stretch for him.

After movie I decided to run over to MGM and ride the roller coaster as I was waiting in the line, that it turns out I didn’t actually have to wait in since they fucking added a single rider line that I didn’t know about till I got to the front and saw them calling up the single riders….sorry…as I was waiting in line I looked up and saw “wood tower hotel”. It struck me as humorous so I snapped a pic…unfortunately it is a little blurry for some fucking reason, but it’s all I got for today…

I drove by this lake near my house the night and “saw” a great pic. So I stopped and snapped some shots, however there were some kids on the dock and it seems like every time I clicked the shutter the dock would shake. In other words I have what at first appear to be good shots, but when I looked closely the pics were kind of fuzzy. So I decided to go over the tonight and see if I could get something.

As it tuns out I think I actually got a better shot than I had planned. The first time I was there is was a bit darker so I didn’t get the same kind of reflections.

While in SanFran I never really got a clear shot of “the bridge”, but I did get a few decent shots of “the other bridge”. The Bay Bridge goes from San Francisco over to Oakland, Berkly, etc. From watching the local news out there, I think that this area is collectively referred to as East Bay. The interesting thing about The Bay Bridge, at least to me is that it is a double decker. The cars going out of the city drive on the bottom deck and the vise is versed for driving into the city. I was unfortunate enough to drive on the top deck of the bridge coming back from the wine valley areas…this bridge has like 5 lines and all them were clogged right the fuck up. Actually once we got on the bridge it wasn’t too bad, but the traffic to get on it was really fucking shitty.

So anyway I think this a nice pretty shot of “the other bridge”. I just happened to be lucky enough to catch the sailboat getting ready to pass under the bridge. The downside of this shot of course is the industrial ship yardy stuff off in the distance.

Oh yeah and that land mass you see the bridge landing on there in the pic is an island, I forget the name.

Technically this picture is a vacation picture, but I intentionally didn’t include it with the travel pics because it doesn’t really have any “context” that forces it into that stack…so to speak. It is one of those pics that you take and you wonder if anyone else would bother to take the pic. I even go so far as to wonder if anyone else has even noticed how interesting this piece of wood sticking up out of a concrete ruin is. I am sure there has to be someone else who noticed this thing just sitting there…waiting…waiting for more waves to wear away at it. Will the future waves transform this hunk of wood into something more interesting, or merely destroy it.

So to keep myself from going crazy I didn’t blog all of the pics I liked from the trip to SanFran. So tonight I figured I would start going back and elaborate on some of those.

I think I mentioned that we tried to go to Sterling, but got denied do to cost and lines and shit. Well across the street from Sterling is the Clos Pagase Winery. What I picked up from the short time I spent in the Napa…the wineries that want to have people visit, and pay for tastings and/or tours, tend to have some type of gimmick to get the people there. For example the gimmick at Sterling is riding in the chair lift. Clos Pagase has interesting architecture and a sculpture garden. I should upload a picture of the building too, but I am not sure if I took it or if my wife did. See there was so much stuff we wanted to get on “film”, but I was busy driving, so she took a bunch of pics as we went down the road. Since I am not 100% sure that I took the pic I don’t want to take credit for it you know what I mean.

Anyway here is a very nice shot of the garden…I think it could almost be a post card, but I think that be and ashtray right there next to the tree…

More pics

I managed to get out the other night and snap a few pics. Mostly just some experimentation, but I managed to get at least one shot that I really like. It is hard to believe that these are weeds. It is crazy how the angle of the sun can make weeds look this cool.

The other interesting bit about this picture is that I took it by setting my “bendy” tripod up on top of my truck. The higher position of the camera gives the shot an interesting perspective.

By the way…It is a whole lot easier to blog about just one pic!

Oh yeah, please go to my gallery and give thumbs up to your favorite pics. I guess you can give thumbs down to the ones you don’t like too, but I really enjoy seeing what pics you guys like. Thanks!

Sunday…earlier in the week we debated about keeping the rental car for two days and taking a drive down the coast to Half Moon Bay. It sounded like a great idea, but we didn’t even think about it till Friday, and I was thinking that I really didn’t want to spend our last day there driving all day. We did make it over to the coast on Sunday by bus, and after seeing the Pacific I kind of regret not taking that drive.

We spent most of the day just chilling out. We went to Whole Foods and picked up some stuff to eat and hung out in the hotel room. Late in the day we decided to hope on a bus and go see the ocean.

This is a Unitarian Church that was right by the bus stop. Since I am a Unitarian it was pretty cool for me to see such a neat UU Church.

The bus dropped us off a few blocks from the ocean. Actually it was more than a few, but all we had to do was transfer to a different bus to get within a couple blocks…don’t ask me why we didn’t do that…

Anyway as you approach the coast you see stuff like this…

The area where we “landed”, was not so much a beach, but it was the coast.

Those trees really are leaning, it is pretty wild. My best guess is the constant breeze off the ocean causes them to grow up at an angle.

There was a tiny patch of sand in this area.

Mostly this area was dominated by the ruins of a big…make that huge, bath house. It was originally built in the 1890’s and burned down sometime in the 60’s. More Info.

We did find the beach.

I guess this concludes our photographic journey. Thanks for reading.

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