One of the niceties of shooting where you live is having the opportunity to shoot the same subject on multiple occasions, and explore it from different locations and perspectives. One such subject in my neighborhood is one of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks, and its signature skyline element: the Transamerica Pyramid.
Erected amidst much controversy in 1972, the Pyramid’s distinctive shape is a fiendishly clever solution to three problems: 1) Transamerica wanted their building to reach higher than the nearby Bank of America building, the tallest in the city at the time; 2) being on the very fringe of where the Financial District meets North Beach and the historic Jackson Square district, there were limits in place on the amount of square footage for offices allowed on that plot of land; and 3) towering as it would over the Gold Rush buildings of Jackson Square, it needed to cast as small a shadow as possible over its neighboring historic district.
The result is an icon.
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As much as I enjoy shooting a particular subject from several locations and perspectives, I also like to experiment with many different post-production treatments, often revisiting and reprocessing a photo even months or years later. Following are a few variations on the theme, with brief explanations of the shot and the process.
This cross-processed shot was taken at Union & Montgomery Streets in North Beach, on Telegraph Hill, four blocks from my building. Montgomery Street ends briefly just over this rise, as the descent from Union to Green Street is too precipitous for cars to handle--which, in San Francisco, means it’s really, really steep.
This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 30D and Canon EF17-40mm f/4L USM lens, and processed using a black & white luminosity mask, and some faux cross processing with a bit of vignetting.
This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Montgomery & Washington Streets, right at the foot of the Pyramid, surrounded on each corner by the Financial District, Jackson Square, North Beach, and Chinatown.
This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.
This black & white shot was taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach. The sharp, angular components of the Pyramid make for excellent high-contrast, red-filtered black & white photos in bright sunlight.
This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Vivitar Series 1 100-400mm f/4.5-6.7 lens, and processed using a custom red-filtered black & white conversion.
This glamour shot was also taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach.
This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF80-200mm f/4.5-5.6 USM lens, and processed using raised midtones and highlights, and a custom color process I call “blue inversion”.
This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets, where North Beach meets Chinatown. The foreground building, one of San Francisco’s two surviving Flatiron buildings, is known as both Columbus Tower and the Sentinel Building, but is most famous for being the home of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope studios, with a Niebaum-Coppola winery cafe on the street.
This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.
And finally, this unprocessed shot is nearly identical to the previous image, taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets in North Beach. While these two buildings appear to be near each other, there’s a difference of two blocks and thirty-five stories between them.
This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF28mm f/1.8 USM lens in late afternoon sun, with no color processing to speak of.
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