This morning I took advantage of the bright spring weather to visit the gardens at Filoli in Woodside. This time of year is always special in the gardens with the fields of daffodils blooming to welcome Spring.
I walked the gardens with my iPhone 11 Pro Max taking photos primary using the default Photo app and a few using the camera in Lightroom on the iPhone. A visit to Filoli this time of year is really a wonderful way to spend a quiet morning just getting out into nature!
I spent a few minutes seated in a chair in the Garden House writing this post.
While heading to the Anderson Collection at Stanford I stopped by Andy Goldsworthy’s sculpture Stone River which lies in the field just across the street. Built from fragments from Stanford buildings damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it’s beautifully crafted and well worth a visit. All of these images were made with my iPhone 11 Pro Max.
While I was waiting for the Anderson Collection at Stanford to open one recent morning (at 11 AM) I walked around back behind the Cantor Arts Center to Richard Serra’s Sequence sculpture. It was a bright sunny morning so I played a bit with the light and shadows on the curves of the steel.
These images were all made with my iPhone 11 Pro Max and processed to black and white using Snapseed. I especially like using Snapseed for monochrome conversion because of the color filters it provides.
As I was walking from the Anderson Collection to the Cantor Arts Center on a recent morning, I noticed these shadows from the palm trees lining the street. I loved the abstract nature of this image – and tried to bring out that mood further by processing into black and white. Once again, I made this image using my iPhone 11 Pro Max.
Last Tuesday morning I enjoyed walking with my friends Doug Kaye and Steve Disenhof south of Market Street in San Francisco. After strolling along The Embarcadero from the Ferry Building, we headed over a couple of blocks to Spear Street and did what we usually do – walked towards the good light!
There are a couple of nice courtyards along Spear Street adjacent to office buildings – including one at 201 Spear Street. This statue of a photographer by sculpture Seward Johnson (named “Smile”) is one of my favorites. I made this image using my iPhone 11 Pro Max in Portrait mode and proceeded it into black and white.
San Francisco International Airport has just opened SkyTerrace – an outdoor viewing platform above Terminal 2 – and which can be accessed from outside of the security screening area which means anyone can visit.
Yesterday I took advantage of the free weekend parking at BART’s Millbrae and caught the BART train for a quick trip over to SFO. BART arrives at SFO inside the G area of the International Terminal. One flight up from the BART platform is AirTrain – the inter-terminal shuttle trains that make it easy to move between terminals. Terminal 2 is two stops away on the Red Line (which runs clockwise around the airport) and the free AirTrains run every four minutes or so.
Exiting the AirTrain platform upon arriving at Terminal 2, I took the elevator down to the Departures level and then looked for the signs to SkyTerrace which is located to the left of the security screening area. There’s an elevator which goes up to Level 4 where SkyTerrace is located and you enter immediately into that area upon exiting the elevator. There’s a quick security screening and then you can head outside to the window-enclosed but roofless patio area where you have a great view of the airport – particularly for departures on Runways 28.
Photographers can take tripods into SkyTerrace – and there were a couple of photographers there when I arrived Saturday afternoon using their tripods and very long lenses to capture some airplane images.
Heading out from SkyTerrace, I took the photo of the SFO Control Tower from the end of the AirTrain platform at Terminal 2. That spot provides a very nice angle for taking that image.
Heading back, I took the Red Line AirTrain again to the Grand Hyatt Hotel exit. This new airport hotel opened a recently and I hadn’t seen what it looked like. The most stunning feature was the beautiful stained glass treatment along the walls as you come down into the hotel lobby from the AirTrain platform.
All of these images were taken with my iPhone 11 Pro Max. I had two of my big cameras along in my camera bag but didn’t bother to take them out – something that’s happening more and more frequently these days given the capabilities of the camera system in the iPhone 11 Pro Max!
During my morning reading this morning I happened across a story about bookmobiles – including a number of photos of older bookmobiles.
The idea dates back to Ms. Mary Lemist Titcomb, a librarian in Maryland who stated in 1905: “Would not a Library Wagon, the outward and visible signs of the service for which the Library stood, do much more in cementing friendship?”
As a kid growing up in Ohio – and later in Maryland with our two children, I can remember my delight in regularly visiting our local bookmobile every week or two. What could be better than having a portable library show up down the street – where you could browse and then borrow free books!
From a recent afternoon photo walk with my Fujifilm X100F. The days are warming but the sun angle is still low in the sky. Her shadow in perfectly parallel to the wall itself – walking directly into the sunlight.
I got serious about losing weight three years ago. In addition to watching portion sizes when eating, the keys to my success in this journey have been:
Last year The Capital Group Foundation gifted a remarkable collection of over a thousand 20th century American photographs to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Cantor has been exhibiting from this collection – beginning with last fall’s display of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston photographs. Today the next exhibition is now up – with photographs from John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, and Wright Morris.
Each of these photographers has a distinctive style which this exhibition mixes beautifully. I was not familiar with Gutmann’s work – but really enjoyed discovering how he captured moments from unique perspectives. Levitt’s New York City photographs (in a mix of both black and white and color) are more familar. Morris’ photographs from the American midwest are uniquely different yet again.
Here’s one of Gutmann’s photographs on the cover of the brochure available at the exhibition which is sitting in my lap. Such a great image with that hand coming out of the broken window!
If you’re able, be sure to visit Cantor between now and April 26, 2020. Cantor doesn’t charge admission – making it a delight for me who lives about 10 minutes away enabling frequent visits! Parking can be challenging up until 4 PM during the week but very available on most weekends. Cantor is open six days each week – closing on Tuesdays.
I recently visited Cantor Art Museum at Stanford to see a temporary small exhibition of Ansel Adams’ work: Surf Sequence. It’s an exhibition of five of his photographs taken in 1940 along the San Mateo county coastline looking down at the surf as the waves move in and out over the sand.
Surf Sequence
They’re beautiful images – as usual with his work. Even more interesting to me, however, were two other images on the opposite wall taken in the late 1920’s of a skier coming down a ski run on Mount Watkins in Yosemite (both images shown below taken with an iPhone 11 Pro Max).
Skiing on Mount Watkins, Yosemite High SierraSkiing on Mount Watkins, Yosemite High Sierra
These images remind me of one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawings – Winter Road – although I’m sure one didn’t directly influence the other!
Winter Road
Winter Road comes from one of O’Keeffe’s books of early drawings and we studied it along with some of her other work during a workshop I attended last summer in Santa Fe. The image above was taken with my iPhone at a wonderful exhibition of her work – Living Modern – that I saw last August at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
I’ve seen a lot of Ansel Adams photographs over the years – but these were new to me. There so different from his usual Yosemite work but very “musical” in some sense. There’s a certain calligraphic look in all of these images – pen strokes that vary in width. Others might see other things – finger patterns in the frost on glass in the wintertime, etc.
