Posts Tagged: San Francisco California
Waiting at the Mark Hopkins
Yesterday I photographed a luncheon for a San Francisco lawyers’ group in the Peacock Court at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. During a down moment I noticed this food server at the ready and looking completely patient, professional, but also a bit procedurally weary. I admired the combination of those three elements in him, and wanted to honor the man by preserving the moment…
(Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco 2017)
Roll the beach
Sometimes
when you drive by the beach
you see big bastard machines
and boys on skateboards
and
you don’t know if
one is going to crush the other
but you figure
what the hell
you might as well stop
have a look
and wait to find out.
(Erosion control @ Ocean Beach, San Francisco 2016. This photo is also on Flickr.)
Two cigarettes
He was pinballing along the sidewalk in front of a Popeye’s at Geneva and Mission. He asked for, and received, a couple of cigarettes, for which he agreed to be photographed. He asked for a bit of money too, but this is the debit card age so there was, unfortunately, no cash compensation available…
(San Francisco 2016)
Jasmine and Buddy
She was sitting on a Japantown sidewalk, on Webster Street around the corner from Nijiya Market. She looked displaced, like a woman who’d just left a difficult relationship and the apartment that went with it. But she also did not look frantic, and I hoped that meant she had friends who could let her crash on a couch for however long she needed to.
Then there was the dog, Buddy. He may well have been the reason she was holding it together, not freaking out, while she figured out how to use the city to take care of them both…
(Japantown, San Francisco 2016)
Outtake from a wedding
A few weeks ago in mid-May, I photographed a wedding at San Francisco City Hall. Afterwards the bride and one of her brothers walked past this guy standing by himself in Civic Center Plaza, obviously protesting gay marriage. The bride was in a happy, jaunty frame of mind, and it was humorously ironic she and some of her wedding party walked by the solitary, disgruntled man…
(San Francisco, 2016)
The aluminum goldmine
The Recology buyback recycling center in San Francisco is only a couple of miles from my house in Brisbane. I drove over there today to unload a bunch of aluminum cans that had piled up in my basement in the last year during periodic late nights watching movies and playing video games. It’s an interesting place, and I thought you’d like to have a look around…
A woman bringing her bags of recyclables to the facility on foot. ↑
Cars and pedestrians waiting to get in. ↑
Where recyclables are weighed to determine their cash value. ↑
This guy had many cans and plastic bottles. ↑
The very cool Recology guy who weighed my aluminum. ↑
(San Francisco 2016)
Praise the lord, pass the steak sauce
I was photographing a wedding dinner at Original Joe’s in North Beach. If you go, order the veal piccata. It’s fantastic. Anyway, it was hard not to notice these six nuns as they walked by the table where my wife and I were awaiting our meal. Right after the waiter handed these ladies their menus, I walked up to their table and said “Sisters, I’ve never seen this many nuns seated at a table in a public restaurant. May I take a picture of all of you?”
They were fine with that. The eldest nun, the woman third from the left near the middle of the picture, even joked with me, saying in a heavy Eastern European accent “if you take our picture you’ll break your camera.” Well, that didn’t happen, fortunately, and I guess I should praise meaty Jesus for it.
(San Francisco 2016)
Mean street cutie pie
She was tagging along while her dad walked his dog along Palou Avenue in Hunters Point in San Francisco. Dad and the dog are on the left. On the sidewalk nearby there was trash, discarded clothing, and a dead raccoon. Hunters Point can be that kind of neighborhood. But that didn’t keep her from skipping, giggling, hugging dad’s dog, and being the cutest thing lighting up the street that day…
(Hunters Point, San Francisco 2016)
Balloonery
At the Spring Open Studios in the Hunters Point Shipyard, purple balloons were de rigueur for the day as markers for signs and chairs in the parking lot…
(Hunters Point, San Francisco 2016)