Greatest Hits!

 My currently limited mobility has put a crimp in my photographic style.  Rather than just run film through a camera to no good end, I thought I would try something different for a while.  My software and my skills have seen a little improvement over the years, so I thought I might rescan some stuff from years past as a check on my progress.  I also have a lot of small deckle-edge prints from the pre-digital age which I'm going to scan for the first time.  To start off, here are a few thoughts on my most productive camera of all time.

A Pentax Spotmatic was the only camera in our house for about twenty-five years.  That's it in the upper left of the photo along with a later model and some lenses which came along a quarter century down the road.  For all that time I only used the lens that came with the camera when we bought it slightly used in 1970; it was an amber coated Super-Takumar 1.8/55.

At the time we bought the camera I was still playing with the idea of being a free-lance photojournalist.  I bought a radio scanner which I installed in my '49 Studebaker pickup and chased fire engines around San Francisco.  I managed to sell a few pictures to the Chronicle and the Examiner and pedaled a few to the wire services as well.  One of those of the car squeezed between two trollies on Church Street ended up on the back page of Life and a couple other photo magazines.  

None of that provided much of a living, however, so I eventually came to my senses and got a job as a social service caseworker for the City's welfare department.

One of my city job assignments was working a late shift at the San Francisco General ER.  That gave me some time during the day to get out to San Bruno Mountain to take pictures of the hawks and owls and to exercise my Saluki's.  I also got interested in falconry, and first trained a Kestrel and later a Red Tailed Hawk for hunting jackrabbits.

Gemma and her pup, Xenophon

A baby in the nest high up in a eucalyptus.

My first Red Tail

I had good times hanging out in photography blinds on the mountain south of town.  Our two daughters came along.  My best coursing dog was hit and killed by a car.  I was getting older and hadn't done a lot of things I thought were important.  So, we loaded everybody and the Pentax in a Ford Econoline van and took off for rural Idaho. (To be continued...)

lucky me

Spent much of the morning going through boxes of old papers and photographs. Threw out a lot.
Kept this one.

Kodachrome Surprise

While going through a box of old family pictures I happened on some Kodachrome slides which I made in 1976 on San Bruno Mountain south of San Francisco.

The Great Horned Owl nest was in a hole in the side of a gully near the mountain's east end.  I believe I found it during a walk with my dogs right about when the eggs were hatching.

The pictures were made with my Pentax Spotmatic, which I still have and use.

To get some pictures of the adults I made a small portable blind which I carried up near the nest before daylight.

Owls are sometimes aggressive around their nests.  They never came after me, but they would not tolerate my dogs in the vicinity.  After they gave one of my Salukis a good whack I left the dogs at home when I was going to visit the owls.

There was a good prey supply on the mountain and the owlettes flourished on a steady diet of rabbits,  mice and voles.

About the time they start growing real feathers the young owls learn to make threat displays which look pretty intimidating.

The young are ready to leave the nest about six weeks after hatching, though the parents will continue to bring them food for some time beyond that.

Looking Back

I've made a few pictures I like during visits to San Francisco over the years.  While I lived there in the early 1970s I made none of any value.  I also failed to make any meaningful contact with any of the many great photographers of the period who had gravitated to the Bay Area.  Luckily, photography being what it is, I can revisit those times now.

I've just finished a book by Peter Bunnell from that era when he was the MOMA photography curator.  His writing style is generally over-wrought, but his profiles of  photographic artists are contemporary and worth reading.  I was particularly taken by some quotes he took from interviews of Ruth Bernhard including these:

"My own creative work comes to me like a gift, pushing itself into my consciousness.  A powerful feeling comes over me.  It's hard to explain, but in a way the image creates itself -- with a little help from me.  It is a timeless experience, almost like being in a trance.  Often I have struggled for days to get the image of the photograph to overlap the spirit I see.  It is an awesome responsibility, and a lonely one."

"I make only one negative when photographing a nude or a still life.  The moment of exposure is the culmination of rejecting all other possibilities.  It often takes me many hours to make a photograph.  I consider creating an image a tremendous privilege."

Part of the reason I find Bernhard's words so compelling is the resemblance to the ideas of David Lewis-Williams about the origins of art in shamanistic visions.  I doubt that Bernhard had to resort to mind-altering drugs to gain access to higher states of consciousness.  The process she describes seems more to resemble the experience of the vision quest, involving isolation, extreme focus, sensory deprivation and overload.  I think it may also be significant that she worked with very large format photographic equipment which requires the exercise of great patience, and concentration.

San Francisco - 1906

A film clip of a cable car ride down Market Street in 1906.



Filmed by the Miles brothers: Harry, Herbert, Joseph, and Earle C.

Goodbye San Francisco

The Balclutha

The Balclutha, a steel-hulled sailing ship, was built in Glasgow in 1886. She was one of the last working square riggers on the high seas. Changes in owners were accompanied by new names: first, the Star of Alaska, and then the Pacific Queen. One of her last voyages was during an appearance in Mutiny on the Bounty in 1935. The ship was acquired by the San Francisco Maritime Museum in 1954.







The camera is my Zeiss Ikon Ikonta A 520, with a Tessar lens and the Compur Rapid shutter. The 6x4.5 format on 120 film yields images with great resolution, and the camera fits easily in a pocket.

Sutro Baths

I took five film cameras on a ten day trip to San Francisco. That was apparently two too many, as I only managed to shoot with three of them.



First up was the little Brownie Reflex which has an uncanny capacity to select what is important in a scene and reject the rest. Since that is what photography is all about, I think my liking for the camera is understandable. I haven't quite yet figured out what the mechanism of selection is in detail.



I was sorry I had only one roll of 127-format Efke 100 to take on the trip. It is a nice film, though the emulsion seems a bit fragile.



We made several visits to the beaches, but only one hike down into Sutro Baths.



We managed to visit all our favorite places in the city, and even explored some new ones.



We always spend the first couple days scheming how we might move back to San Francisco. After that, reality sets in and we admit that it is an impractical idea.