Outside Lighting In

Bixby Bridge HAER and acronyms like A.P.I.W.A.T.W.

Poison Oak be damned, it's nice when a 5x7 large format (LF) photography trip for a HAER photo documentation works out. It almost makes the two weeks with a rash worth it. I'll forget about the rash, but in the spirit of the HABS/HAER/HALS* programs these photos will endure in cold storage at Fort Meade in the LoC P&P* storage facility. Two weeks of itchin' & scratchin' for 500+ years of public benefit... So worth it.

If you decide to get out of your car on Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and photograph in this area watch out for those little Poison Oak plants with red leaves, "leaves of three, let it be." There are a million pages on the WWW about Poison Oak and they are all over the Big Sur hills. If I ever write a magazine article about photography in coastal CA (California) there will be a section about Posion Oak, so be careful.

1000-360    Bixby Bridge HAER-CA-2297  Two-part panoramic photo of bridge deck and south pier. ^click photo to zoom

This brings to mind the adage: "A picture is worth a thousand words," (aPiWaTW, OK that one's ridiculous) It's actually two pictures, so maybe it's 2000 words, plus a couple hundred to describe the itching and the perfect weather conditions, and it's a panorama (not quite 360° degrees, but who's counting). So in this vain I think the acronymic photo title should be: 1000/360 now I just need to get a magazine to run it. And for those of you who stumbled upon this BLOG (Web log) and photo on the WWW and have never heard of all these silly letters:

* The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), are historical documentation collections administered by the National Park Service (NPS) Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) and available in the Library of Congress (LoC) Prints & Photographs (P&P) Reading Room. The collections of thousands of heritage buildings, bridges, tunnels, and parks can be keyword searched on the Library of Congress website:  http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/ 

The Bixby Bridge images from this itchy outing will be sent to HDP in late 2012 and should be searchable in 2014. I can now join DATIC, the official club of people who: Drop Acronyms to Increase Credibility.

The "F"-word & The HABS at the Edge of America

One of the most interesting HABS photography projects in a while took me to the bottom edge of America this month to photograph the San Ysidro Customs House in San Diego at the Tijuana border, shown here in this view from the public pedestrian entry tunnel into the USA.

 

Built as the original border station in 1932 for cars and pedestrians the Spanish Revival Building with a decorative cupola now sits beside the new high-tech border crossing where over twenty lanes of cars, vans and buses sit in longs lines on the 5 Freeway coming across the US/Mexico border.

 

click photos for a larger view >>>>>

 

The building has been a bit marginalized as the border crossing has expanded and enveloped the setting but the happy news is it will be adaptively reused instead of being demolished or moved to another location. The project worked out as a nice HABS documentation with help from the staff at the site even though we had planned to photograph overall context views from a building that had been demolished a week before we arrived at the site... surprise.

 

Cole Smothers, my assistant on this project, caught the photo below of me jammed into the corner of America, along side the high fences that surround the Customs House. This project was a challenge because most of the building was surrounded by fences, barricades and walls, making composition of the exterior facades a cram-me-into-a-corner-with-a-camera affair. Surprises make life interesting and support my faith in the "F"-word... Flexibility! 

 

Schaf in the Corner of America. Photo by Cole Smothers

Talented Masons, Opium Pipes, and a Big Hole in San Francisco

I like San Francisco in December, I hope it becomes a habit. A year ago I spent a drizzly December day doing a HABS-like documentation of a handsome brick building on Natoma Street in Downtown San Francisco. 

This was a small building documentation brought on by the construction of the new $4 Billion Dollar Transbay Transit Center that is replacing the old Timothy Pfleuger designed Transbay Terminal. Since the expansion plan for the project extended over multiple blocks it required demolition of some old and new buildings including 77 Natoma shown above, and I was commissioned to record the features, interior and context of the building before it was demolished.

CLICK ON PHOTOS FOR A LARGER VIEW

A year later the project has just made headlines worldwide as artifacts of the Gold Rush era began to surface at (or rather under) the construction site. The buildings on Natoma shown above including the newer, metal-clad, rounded one on the right and the old bus ramp on the left are all a big hole in the ground now, San Francisco's version of Boston's BIG DIG. Archeologists from William Self Associates are busy combing through the site and preserving the history of an 1880s residential neighborhood now long gone (probably replaced by commercial buildings similar to the one I documented at 77 Natoma).

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/development/2011/12/dig-sfs-transport-terminal-unearths-artifacts

This is how it all looks today in December 2011 from the roof of a building just down the block while I was in the city doing another couple HABS projects. The brick buildings are gone, the bus ramps are gone, the Pfleuger Terminal is gone and construction proceeds day and night - but opium pipes, chamber pots and porcelain doll heads from the 1880s keep telling stories. 

CLICK ON PHOTOS FOR A LARGER VIEW

Exercise in Lighting...(or lighting as exercise)

This week my photo assistant Dave Sanchez and I put in three long days in the Sierras above Bishop, California photographing a Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation of some hydro-electric powerplants. In a way it was peaceful. Not because of the beautiful surroundings, the yellow Aspens, the clean air and the snow-capped peaks, because that did indeed make lunchtime attractive. No, the peaceful part was in our head. Because the generators and turbines were spinning the entire time, we had both the constant hum of the machinery and earplugs to avoid the din, forcing all communication to take the form of lip reading (short words) pointing and impromptu sign language (double peace-sign means f22); it gave us a lot of time to think.

The exercise regimen forced on Dave was required by a dark corner in the control room which stubbornly wanted to stay dark. There was little room to move, and less room to set up lights, though I tried before switching them on, only then seeing the brushed aluminum behind the new switches created a very effective reflector - right back into the camera. Changing gears, we went with the new LED spotlights I had brought, allowing the light to be focused into the old switchboard while avoiding the modern mirrored one opposite the camera. I wanted to avoid casting confusing shadows that might make it hard to understand the various gauges, buttons and levers on the panel so we used the "lightpainting" technique, allowing the movement of the lights to erase the edges of the shadows. While the dark corner would be easy to fix in Photoshop on a digital photo, the 5x7 film negatives need to be properly exposed because there is very little manipulation done in the darkroom, and usually only selective darkening of parts of a frame rather than lightening up shadowy areas. The unretouched result is shown above.

The video may be a little loud... it was inside the Powerhouse after all...

 

Here we are making the final photos, after we finished the large format views and the 5x7 camera was put away, we were doing the duplicate digital views from the same tripod position. The 5x7 film views required ten second exposures and the digital only three seconds each, but this is why assistants never gain weight on my projects. 

HABS Photographer Stephen Schafer Selected for Best of ASMP 2011

 

I'm excited to be one of twenty photographers chosen from more than 150 projects submitted by my peers for the seventh annual Best of ASMP 2011 (and the first HABS photographer).

The American Society of Media Photographers, founded in 1944, is the premier trade association for the world's most respected professional photographers. Promoting photographers' rights and providing education in better business practices.

The selected 2011 photographers run the gamut, from documentary to digital shot using a remote-controlled helicopter... and beyond. The twenty photographers have some pretty interesting stories about how and why they chose to execute their photographic vision, I'm just glad I could round out the mostly digital group with my state-of-the-art-1933 approach to HABS photography on the Ahwahnee. The interview has some fun photos of SF County Jail #3 along with photos of the Kaufmann House and Ennis House that will be donated to the Library of Congress HABS, HAER, HALS photography collection in the future.

The 20 Interviews at this link:  ASMP Best of 2011 Link

 

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MaD FLAWS Mnemonic for Seven Aspects of Integrity (National Register)

Up 'til midnight working on a Apple-Keynote slideshow for the CPF "Historic Context Statements" workshop in Norco, California... Now what were those damn 7 aspects of integrity for the National Register of Historic Places? Craftsmanship? Siting? I've gotta Google it...again.

Materials, Design, Feeling, Location, Association, Workmanship, Setting... this is the 46th time I've looked this up, how am I gonna remember this?

I need a Mnemonic to remember the seven aspects of integrity... MaD FLAWS

(MA-terials, D-esign, F-eeling, L-ocation, A-ssociation, W-orkmanship, S-etting)

Now, for some sleep.

-Schaf