Posts Tagged: albany
Night Excursion
#2 (click image to view large)
A first pass at working with some night shots from earlier this evening.
#1 (click image to view large)
#3 (click image to view large)
Solano Sunset
Solano Sunset (click image to view large)
From last night, December 28, 2011. No rain yet this season, and so the sunsets continue to be colorful. I guess there is just a lot of stuff in the air that makes it go orange. It is not healthy, and everything could use a drink, but at least we get this as a consolation.
Mystery of Communication
Lomo Stationwagon
Late last week I finally decided to stop and shoot the station wagon I’d passed several times on my commute to and from work. That night as I was perusing Google+, I read something which led me to some free Lightroom presets. I decided I’d try out a couple. The first one was a kind of lomo effect. I applied it to the station wagon and posted on flickr. I didn’t think to much about it; I have not been too active lately and I’ve not been getting many veiws, which is understandable. I have just been trying to keep up with the post-a-day project, and not getting much chance to check out what everybody else is doing.
So, I was surprised the next day when the photo had been explored and getting tons of views and faves. I thought it was a pretty boring shot. I guess people like this lo-fi stuff. The popularity of hipstamatic is testament to that. So with that here a gallery with a couple more attempts to explore this theme.
- Lomo Stationwagon
Albany Streetscape
Shot from the bathroom window as the sun descends behind Marin.
Silhouette Memorial
War Memorial Silhoutte. Click to view large. © neo serafimidis 2011
As I passed, a jangling of neurons: something strangely familiar. I stopped. A minaret against the sky. Ironic perhaps, in these xenophobic times. Awaiting the crescent moon and the north star, just the same.
Bike Party!
Ever since starting this new job, I have been meaning to start biking to work. But, not having been on my bike for months, I was wary of just jumping on, riding the six miles or so to work, and then being in any condition to start working upon arrival. Some kind of warm seemed to be in order.
As it happened, I heard for the first time yesterday about the East Bay Bike Party, their ride through my end of the East Bay. But since I couldn’t find start details, I wasn’t sure whether I could even participate. I had sort of written it off. By the time Theo and returned from his Cub Scout pack meeting, it was after 8 pm. In fact it was just as we arrived home that we heard loud music and a gawd-awful racket outside. We went outside to look, and there it was: the bike party.
One of the organizers stopped to chat me up and give me flyer with the route on it. Hmmm… I decided to go for it. I went in and quickly through camera in bag, put on a hoodie, pumped up the tires and rode off into the night to catch up.
I caught up with the party at Cedar Rose Park and stayed with it until the final destination at Albany Bowl. I hate to be such a johnny-come-lately evangelist, but damn that was fun! Riding through the night, taking back the street, or at least the right lane, whooping and hollering is a great return to simple pleasures.
Albany Commercial Streetscape #5
Albany Streetscape Project
I managed to get some shooting in yesterday and today, and so made good progress on my project to photograph all of Albany’s commercial streetscape. In fact, I managed to finish off the north side of Solano Ave between San Pablo and Peralta. I even went into Berkeley a bit there. Where is that border anyway?
This leaves the south side of Solano as the big chunk left to do. But it’s a hard one, since the building fronts are virtually always in shadow, except for the sunrise and sunset during a few weeks around the summer solstice. Of course, I can just leave them dark. Or I could shoot for exposing the storefronts and not worry about blowing out the sky and surrounding objects. I’m not about to try HDR on this one section, so let’s not go there.
I suppose I should consider Solano on west side of San Pablo as well, but that feels more residential down there. Perhaps just the first block would suffice to call the project truly complete.
Pinewood Derby
Albany Pack 3 Pinewood Derby
This year’s Pinewood Derby was nearly 3 hours of racing and photo-shooting fun. It’s may be the funnest thing we do all year. Everyone gets into it, parents, siblings and scouts.
This time around, Theo was committed to making a green sparkly lizard for some reason. He helped design the shape, picked out the colors and sparkles, and the googly eyes. He didn’t want to really do much of the actual physical work. I can’t blame him, I didn’t either. So, I made him at least start each of the tasks, except for the cutting on the band saw! Letting him play with that didn’t seem like a real good idea. But he worked at least a little on the rasping and sanding and painting and gluing.
Last year, Theo got the award for Coolest Car. He was the only one to affix legos and Clone Troopers to his car. This year there were several with lego parts or lego figures attached. This year he came up short, despite actually doing much better in the race. In three heats he went 2-1-2. Then in his semi-final race, he came in second. But they only took the first-place cars for a four-car final race. It was largely dominated by the Bear den. They must have some engineering secrets over there.
While there has been a sibling category so that all the kids can get into the fun, year was the first time that we’ve had a parents category. There were no weight or other rules limiting what one could do with the car for the parents. So, of course someone took the nuclear option. Or at least the CO2 option, as you can see below.
Albany Commercial Streetscape #4
Untitled / © neo serafimidis 2011
This is the last shot I took yesterday before stopping for the day. This is processed in Lightroom with a Velvia preset I found somewhere, and that I have adjusted a bit, actually dialing back the contrast and intensity a bit. As you can tell, I’m continuing to experiment with the look for this streetscape series. It’s hard to decide what to settle on, in part because a given look doesn’t really work equally well on each shot. Also, I have at least three different process approaches that I like and can’t decide between. Even black and white is really attractive.
I want the series to have as consistent a look as possible, but I suspect that it is going to be hard to achieve on account of the quite different light conditions under which the various stretches of streetscape get shot. They are getting shot a couple weeks apart with the sun in a different place, different whether and sky, and different time of day. Moreover, it takes me a couple hours to shoot a half mile, and the light changes pretty dramatically just during that time.
Streetscape
Jay-Vee / © Neo Serafimidis 2011
Today was such a day of photography, it was almost like work. It started this morning with Albany Cub Scouts Pack 3 Pinewood Derby. That was over three hours of shooting. Then, after a little lunch, I went out to make some progress on the Albany Commercial Streetscape project. I started shooting the east side of San Pablo at the El Cerrito border and made it down to Solano Ave, before it was time to get home. My guess is that this is about half the length of it. I was pleased with the progress made today in terms of quantity. It remains to be seen what was accomplished in terms of the images themselves. Right now, I’m predicting that the two liquor stores are the most interesting subjects on the side. I thought I’d play with this one in black and white, even though I keep saying that the series won’t be. Maybe I’ll have to rethink that, too.
West Albany Apartment
Camper and House / © neo serafimidis 2011
This makes me want to revisit the idea of photographing every home in Albany. It would be a huge undertaking, but it sure would be fun. And yet, I am still only 25% through photographing the commercial buildings. That suggests the residences are probably a project that can wait for my next forced retirement, and the kid has gone off to college.
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