The Trip: San Francisco 2007
I met my dad in Denver for spring break during my Junior year of college. We took the California Zephyr across the Rockies and over the beautiful Sierra Nevadas past Lake Tahoe. A fire had destroyed a section of the rail bridge near Sacramento, so a bus completed the journey into downtown San Francisco.
My dad’s favorite part of the trip was our expedition to the Golden Gate: I hadn’t seen it up close in a few years, so I expressed a desire to venture out and see it since it was a clear day and I had my camera. It was a long walk from the hotel! Being San Francisco, by the time we arrived – having walked halfway across the city – the landmark bridge was obscured from fog so thick we were standing underneath it and couldn’t see it. From time to time when my dad is in San Francisco he still taunts me with photos of the bridge. If you were to ask my dad about the trip, you’d hear his side of the story for sure!
The Composition
Several days later, we were exploring the city streets near Pier 1, and this puddle reflection caught my eye. I noticed the unique perspective and clean lines that seemed a perfect frame to the famous Ferry Building tower. It doesn’t have the range of tonal values some black and white images do (or zones for Ansel fans), but what it lacks in that area it makes up for in unique perspective. I call it one of my favorite photos, and it was a great trip.
The Journey
Throughout the years since, between moving and switching computers, I nearly lost the image. In fact, I am still searching for the negative itself. This file is from the developer’s scanner, for those that remember the option to have your film developed into prints with a CD of medium resolution scanned files. In college, when not on assignment for the yearbook, I shot with two film cameras. My first was a Minolta SRT-102 I purchased from ebay – the same camera I learned to shoot with as a child. My second was a Minolta Maxxum 7 that I received from my parents for my birthday (~2005); with respect to design, build, and layout it is still my favorite camera.
In the world of electronics, though, the four years between receiving the Minolta and finally having the means to purchase my own digital camera is an eternity. By that time Sony had bought Minolta’s camera business, and I went with a Nikon D700 instead. It is a camera with the low-light performance I would have loved while shooting basketball games in college, and still going strong today.
My film cameras are still there in my closet having survived five moves so far, albeit not as active as they once were. I recently discovered an exposed roll of TMax in my SRT-102; I’ll have to see what it was I captured that has been waiting in the closet.
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