garrison beau scott

San Francisco is an amazing city. Unless you’re looking for a parking spot. I didn’t live in the city, so I didn’t have to endure the sometimes endless search for a place to put my car on a daily basis, but I did go into the city enough to develop a real disdain for driving there.

Fortunately, San Francisco, much like NYC, is a town you can get to, and around in, without a car. And as a photographer who likes to walk, and walk, and walk, well a car only gets in the way. When this was taken, sometime in 2000, I was living in Marin, which is north of the Golden Gate. There are two options for mass transit for getting into S.F. One is the bus, which takes forever, and the other is the ferry. Which is a 45 minute bit of heaven. Awesome views, wind in your face observation decks, warm and toasty inside seating, AND they serve beer and wine.

Suffice to say, I took the ferry. Which is how and why I got this shot. After a day in the city, I was on my way back to catch the boat home, walking up Market Street. The building in the lower left is the clock tower at the Ferry Building, and the spotlights that run up the center originate at The Embarcadero.

On my way to the first Thursday gallery openings in San Francisco a few years back. I had the Voigtlander with me and came across this old beat up Victorian about mid-Market Street. I think it was the plastic in the windows that first caught my attention, but then I quickly noticed the birds hanging out along the edges. I looked through the ground glass at my composition and though I liked what I saw, there was something missing.

I knew that if I waited long enough, one of those damn birds would take flight. I just didn’t realize how long it would take. So I framed the shot, resigned to the fact I would have to live with the power line. At the time, I avoided power lines like sunsets and kittens. Don’t get me wrong, I like pictures of sunsets and kittens, even kittens at sunset, especially in a field of flowers, and throw in a kid eating an ice cream cone and my cup runneth over, but I leave the taking of those shots to the ones who do it better.

Anyways, as I was saying, I made it a practice to avoid at all costs power lines, but for this shot I had no choice. At the time, I thought I could just re-touch the negative and made up my mind not to think about it any more. Besides, I had enough on my plate, standing there on Market Street, holding a twin lens Voigtlander out at arms-length, chest high, and fielding questions from an inordinate amount of people wondering what the hell it was I was doing, all this without taking my eye of those birds and wishing just one of them would decide to see if anything was happening somewhere else.

If I remember correctly, I had to change my exposure a few times, and about the time I began to wonder if the birds on the ledge were actually rats with a suicide pact waiting for the first one to jump, it happened.

When I got it home and printed it for the first time, I realized that the wire needed to remain in the shot for balance. And I thanked the gods of Bresson for his lessons.

I dig taking pictures of window displays. All the work has pretty much been done for you, it’s lit and you don’t have to worry about anything moving around, or the situation changing on you.

This was taken on the way from a friend’s opening in San Francisco to the dinner he threw afterwards. I didn’t normally take my camera to openings back then, but this shot, and another I’ll post soon, changed that.

I had been shooting with a Olympus OM2, 35mm camera for the better part of 8 years when Heather gave me a twin-lens Voigtlander for my birthday in 1999. This camera dramatically changed the way I saw things and consequently, changed the way I went about making pictures. With the waist-level view finder it felt like I had eye balls on my fingertips, I was able to see the scene in ways never before available to me with the OM2. I didn’t have to put the camera up to my face to compose a picture, just wave my hand.

My Voigtlander was built sometime in the 1940’s and had little in the way of “features.” It was manual in every sense of the word. To wind the film, I had to line up the number on the film backing with the little red window on the back of the camera. The focus rings were stripped and so I only knew when the camera was focused at infinity, all the way in, or to 3 1/2 feet, racked all the way out. Any distance in between was pure guesstimation. Needless to say there was no TTL metering.

With a renewed zeal for making pictures, I took the Voigtlander out and over the course of the next year shot with it whenever and wherever I could, eventually breaking it. I got some really cool pictures though before I had to retire the camera and turn it into a bookend. Here’s one.

I had seen this bit of graffiti one day on Market Street in San Francisco while riding the F Line and made a mental note to take a picture. A few months later I happened to walk by it again at night after a party. My initial picture didn’t justify the effort and it wasn’t until a few weeks later when I happened by it again that I made the exposure that became this image. A perfect case of learning from your mistakes. I have no idea what it really says and have come up with Choubmb, which I know has to be off. But what the hell…