Photochrome Camera Club

The California Academy of Science has great photo opportunities waiting to be explored. Here is the 2011 list of free admission dates for San Francisco residents in each city ZIP code:

Parkside, Sunset (94116, 94122): June 10, 11, 12 & Oct 28, 29, 30.
Richmond, Seacliff, Presidio, Western Addition (94115, 4118, 94121, 94129):  June 3, 4, 5 & Sept 30, Oct 1, 2.
Ingelside-Excelsor, Visitacion Valley (94112, 94134): May 27, 28, 29 & Oct 14, 15, 16.
Hayes Valley, Tenderloin, Downtown, SoMa, Treasure Island, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, Bayview-Hunters Point (94102, 94103, 94104, 94105, 94107, 94111, 94124, 94130, 94158): June 17, 18, 19 & Oct 7, 8, 9.
Cole Valley, Haight, Glen Park, St. Francis Wood, Lake Merced (94117, 94127, 94131, 94132: May 13, 14, 15 & Sept 23, 24, 25.
Mission, Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, Castro (94110, 94114): June 24, 25, 26 & Nov 4, 5, 6.
Chinatown, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, North Beach, Marina (94108, 94109, 94123, 94133): May 20, 21, 22 & Sept 16, 17, 18.

*Each visiting adult must show a valid photo ID with proof of residency. The following items or combination are acceptable:
- A driver license or state ID card.
- Photo ID plus postmarked envelope, postcard, or magazine label with name and date.
- Photo ID plus utility bill (gas/electric/cable), bank statement, or letter from a government agency with name and home address (not a P.O. Box).

Gary

There will be a minor change to this Thursday’s Print Night.

Because the Church will be needing the regular downstairs meeting room that night,  Stacy has requested that we change the location to the upstairs meeting room/gallery annex.  Since this is a very nice room with great lighting, I know that you will approve of this change of venue.

Directions:  To find this room, just walk around the front of the church and proceed along the walkway to thefront door.  Once inside, make a right turn down the hall… and you are immediately there.

By the way, I plan to demonstrate my “quick and dirty” method of mounting prints.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve been up to!
- Alan

It’s finally time to visit the Tea Garden and see what images we can create. Located at Tea Garden Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in the Golden Gate Park, it offers plenty of subjects to compose interesting photos for our viewing. The Drum Bridge, Pagoda or Chain of Ponds always make great images from any point of view. Lets start photographing at 9:00 AM when it opens. Hopefully we can get plenty of shots before the crowds arrive in their tour buses. There is a small entrance fee of $5 for adults and $3 for seniors. Parking may be found at Stow Lake, or in the underground parking garage at the music concourse.
Lets have coffee at the de Young Museum around 11:15 AM. There is no entrance fee for visiting the cafe.
See you there.

Gary Larsen

I’ve been asked by club members a couple of times about advice for buying laptops that you can use for photography when travelling. A lot of photographers use a desktop as their main digital darkroom because of their power, the ability to add extra hard drives and to accurately calibrate their screens among other reasons. However, when we’re travelling we want a PC to take with us. So what should you look for?

To begin with, if the laptop is not going to be your primary machine I don’t recommend that you spend too much. You don’t need to buy a top of the line business or gaming laptop if you just need it for your vacations, browsing the Photochrome website in front of the TV, or doing your email away from your home office. Laptops take a beating from being carried around and I’d much rather buy a cheap, new laptop every 3 or 4 years than an expensive one less often than that.

Secondly don’t buy a larger machine than you need. Some laptops have monster 17″+ screen which are great for editing photos on but you won’t want to carry them very far and their battery lives are generally worse than their smaller siblings. That said, I would recommend a 10″ netbook. Netbooks are small, cheap laptops that have become very popular but I would avoid them for photography because they don’t have the hourse power or real estate needed for editing photos even casually.

My preferred laptop screen size is about 12″. At this size the screen is usable if a little small but the machine is small enough to carry without breaking your back. If you’re going to travel with it I wouldn’t recommend a machine with a screen bigger than 15″.

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Participants - Back row left to right: Bob Nelson, Willis Zhoe, Charlie Wambeke , Idalia Larsen , Gary Larsen, Harold Cook, Susan Higgins, Joseph Higgins. , Garrett Griffin, Stephen Lee, Chris Kibre. Front row: Pam Nelson, Jim Elliot, Alan Heald, Christa Kaufmann, HH, George Gibbs and Burr Preston.

The old logo at many antique stores that reads “we buy junk but sell antiques” applies in spades to the Urban Ore Store in Berkeley.  A large contingent of Photochromers showed up there on a warm Saturday in early February for a morning of dumpster diving in the biggest dumpster in the Bay Area.  It was not junk or antiques the members sought but images of the same.

Three acres, some outside and some under a roof, make up the Urban Ore establishment.  Like ore, used paraphernalia of all sorts is mined there whether for a house, yard, closet, roof or what have you.  Used doors, toilets, sinks, tubs and every other conceivable domestic appliance are stocked in huge numbers and varieties in the outside yard.  I would hazard a guess that one could find a replacement for anything that needs replacing.  If they don’t have it, you don’t need it.  Jewelry, clothes, toys along with more exotic artifacts lie half hidden inside the building.  These items are but a few of the infinite numbers of flotsam and jetsam stuffed all around the property.

For two hours members photographically mined images they hadn’t seen or thought about in years and indeed several things they had never seen. They even recorded some things they hoped they would never see again.

After a fleeting but pleasant couple of hours, the members adjourned to a nearby café for cake, coffee and a rehash of their journey through an extraordinary junk yard cum antique shop cum building supply house for nearly anything anyone could ever dream of needing and many things they really would never need but were fascinated enough by to at least stop and take a picture.  It proved a dumpster diving photographer’s paradise.