Month: October 2011
Electronic Frost Bite at Yosemite
Posted on October 30, 2011 in Photography Photos Silicon Valley Travels - Past
I had a particularly crapulous and petty boss. One year, he gave me two days off at the holidays: Christmas and New Years. I worked up until 5 p.m. on both Christmas and New Year’s Eve, then came back to do pretty much nothing the days after.
This fellow just hated people who saw more to their lives than the enrichment of his personal income. I had been looking forward to the holidays as a time when my wife and I could relax and maybe see some of the parks. His crude maneuver of granting us only the minimal holidays threatened this.
But I found a way around it. Yosemite was only three hours away. I made up my mind to go there.
I announced this as I left the office. He mumbled something about the impossibility and foolhardiness of the venture. The next morning, I rose at six, loaded my camera and spouse in the car, and crossed the San Joaquin Valley to Yosemite.
I discovered a serious limit to what my camera could do. 8008s run off ordinary AA batteries. They can go a long time on four of these. But as I discovered when I stopped to photograph a beautiful waterfall, the batteries freeze up when it is too cold. As other people snapped away using their older SLRs, my state-of-the-art technology balked. Fstop and speed numbers flashed on the tiny screen ((This was no digital)) and then disappeared. My precious camera had died.
The Nikon came back to life when we parked in the village. I quickly figured out that if I kept the camera warm, it would keep taking pictures. So I rattled off two quick shots of the place where Yosemite Falls should have been ((The first time I laid eyes on the wonder was on this January day. And they weren’t there. Instead, the wall was covered by a long icicle. The next time we tried was on the last day of a trip — December 1 of the same year. Tioga Pass was still open, so we crossed the Sierras there and decided that while we were in Yosemite, we would slip into the Valley. This time the situation was even worse because the year had been especially dry. There was only the gray wall! We waited several years before we tried again and this time we went in the spring. Finally, we saw cascade after cascade thundering down the Valley walls. It’s all a matter of timing.)) and started on some closeups.
I danced with oak leafs, maple seeds, and a dead bee for about half an hour before we realized that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d have to drive the twisting road off the mountain in the dark. So we left the Yosemite Valley, stopped for dinner at a Golden Corral in — was it Merced or Modesto? — and made it home by nine in the evening.
I had had my holiday.
Thoughts on Models
Posted on October 9, 2011 in Morals & Ethics Photography Social Justice
Models need to understand that they are part of the creative process and photographers need to treat them as creative peers.
On Rudeness and Obliviousness
Posted on October 6, 2011 in Photography Vacation Spring 2007
Watch where you stand when taking a photograph
The time I saw Steve Jobs
Posted on October 5, 2011 in Privacy Silicon Valley
I had this photography assignment for my color class, you see. The assignment was to create a presentation of about 50 slides with music. So I was out with my Pentax K-1000 taking pictures of small pieces of the city of Palo Alto. Someone had left some green and yellow balloons tied to the chairs outside of a coffee shop, so I put my color rules into play and took a couple of pictures.
I looked up and there he was, sliding down the street on his roller blades. The bad boy hero of Silicon Valley strode on wheels not twenty feet away. He saw me standing there. Almost instantly the happy smile dropped from his face. “A photographer! My afternoon is ruined!” I could hear the disappointed words flow out of his head and onto the pavement between us.
Looking him in the eye, I let the camera drop to my chest and took my hands off of it. Yes, Mr. Jobs, I was saying to him, you, too, are entitled to your private moments. He kept speeding on and disappeared into a tunnel that ran under the CalTrain tracks.
I never saw him again.
Taking The Picture at Bonneville
Posted on October 3, 2011 in Photography Photos Vacation Fall 2011
The world’s flattest place offers little if you can’t or won’t pay the entrance fee into the area where they run the test runs for the world’s fastest vehicles, but the one free memory it leaves you is potent.
My family visited Salt Lake City every couple of years because both sets of my grandparents (gentiles all!) lived there, but we always took the road that came through Las Vegas and Cedar City, never the one that shot through Wendover and across the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The highway here is so straight that the state of Utah has put up signs warning drivers against falling asleep. You start in Wendover, hit a few steel plates that the Utah road crews have left — just to wake you up? — and keep going for fifty, sixty, maybe seventy miles eastwards without a single curve to trouble your slumber.
The one big attraction other than the Great Salt Lake and its marshes (which are forty or so miles in) is the Bonneville Race Track which I first knew when the Spirit of America set a land speed record there. Drivers of bikes, motorcycles, and cars come to Bonneville because it is one of the flattest places on the planet. If you have ever seen The World’s Fastest Indian, this is the track that the protagonist had set himself out to visit.
It costs $20 to enter the track ($70 if there is an event), so we pulled out a hundred yards or so outside of it to take The Picture. There is only one picture that people come to Bonneville to take. You can, I suppose, capture the mudtracks that nearly claimed the cars of some, but the Picture features a long, grim view of the flats and a range of mountains about two to five miles away.
I got out of the truck and walked about 100 feet onto the flats. Immediately, I felt why it would have been a bad idea to have driven out there: beneath the thin salty crust was a grey mud that gently sucked in your feet. As I set up my tripod, another fellow who had not studied the surface as he got to this point, drove out just behind us and got stuck. I smiled at the Big Whoops and kept setting up my camera. He gunned his engine, spun his wheels, and finally got his wife to do the gas while he jumped up and down in the bed of his truck. This got him out and they parked just off the paved road behind us.
Now mind you, I brought seven cameras on this trip and I used five of them here. The most exciting for me — the one that had my hands trembling as I set it down on the empty lakebed — was the pinhole camera. I estimated the exposure and counted off the numbers as the man’s black dog ran up to my wife and barked as she bent over to pet it.
The couple came over and chatted while I took more pictures. They were on an unplanned road trip, going from place to place to gamble, eat, watch shows, and see the sights. The man laughed as he recounted how he had nearly lost his truck in the mud — everyone who comes to Bonneville wants to race right? — and shook his head at his own boneheadedness. As I brought out more cameras, he asked me if I was a professional photographer. No, I explained, just an enthusiast with a capital E. The camera that interested him most was the one I brought out last — my Instax 210. I took this version of The Picture:
then showed it to him. Word that there were still instant cameras about had not reached him, so I turned around and took a picture of him, his wife, and his dog, gifting them the photo. We all went our separate ways, but I said to Lynn “They were nice people. And they needed a memory.”
Clean Air at Fossil Butte
Posted on October 2, 2011 in Vacation Fall 2011
Morning started when we awoke at 6:30 am. We were in the truck and out of Jackson, Wyoming by seven fifteen. Our Mapquest directions took us through a list of turns that took us into Idaho for ten miles, but most of the way kept us in Wyoming.
They call the land around Fossil Butte a “cold desert”. It’s nothing like the desert that I have taken the time to explore on and off over the years in Southern California. This was no Mojave. No Joshua Trees or Barrel Cactus. Just miles and miles of sagebrush. I remember that the big landmark of the trip down was the World’s Largest Elkhorn Arch in a place that I believe was called Alton. The arch stretched over four lanes of road. They really took their Second Amendment solutions to heart here, I thought, but did not stop for this memorial to kitsch and carnage.
I drove fast until the brown signs telling the way to the monument appeared on the roadsides. That is usually a certain sign that you are close unless you happen to be heading to Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The brown road signs appear 200 miles away near Las Vegas and in Utah. I wonder how many people have become disheartened searching for the park only to discover that they were on one of Nevada’s many highways to nowhere?
Compared to those, the route we took through Wyoming was heavily populated. When we made the final left under the Union Pacific tracks and then the right on Chicken Ranch Road, we found ourselves in the land of sagebrush. A cold desert is what they called it, like I told you before. At the entrance sign we stopped and looked at the lonely promontory from which the NPS property took its name.
You might say it is plain, but I felt its power rearing out of the flats. Along the top, fossil hunters had found the bones of fish and other creatures dwelling around a tropical lake a few million years ago. There’s quite a market for specimens taken from the Green River Formation. The State of Wyoming, ever after a dollar, leases out a few quarries to collectors. The quarry at Fossil Butte is now closed.
I, a native Southern Californian, have seldom known a clear morning. This one felt as if you could make out every twig on every sagebrush bush. Yes, there was a nip to the air. But it was the clarity of the atmosphere that excited me the most. I took out my grandfather’s Ihagee Exakta and aimed it at the butte. Later I would use my Nikon and my Instax. It would be a good day for photography.
This is part of a nonsequential memoir of our recent vacation. Expect more.
