Karl Auerbach

@mattblaze@federate.social Our nearby power station - Moss Landing - has been torn down over the last few months leaving only the two prodigious smoke stacks. Those stacks can be seen from all around the Monterey Bay and from out at sea. The power station itself was mostly open to the outside, hence not particularly good for redevelopment except as one of the world’s largest (if not the largest) grid battery systems (actually two systems.)

@mattblaze@federate.social I agree that black and white can show us things that are in front of our eyes but we do not see.

Lange’s famous photo of a dust-bowl refugee woman and her children would have been transformed from a pained, desperate person into an entirely different thing, a Madonna, had it been in color.

I’ve gone into the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) where a large number of black and white films were made. I go to the various locations, get my eyes to see things from the camera’s angles, and I’m distracted by the colors.

Imagine things like the opening scene of Woody Allen’s film Manhattan done in color? No way.

The other night I re-watched the 1949 short film “Pacific 231” - the film’s power would have been reduced had it been in color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-DukkgAmk

@mattblaze@federate.social I love your photos; I wish I had your eye for images and framing, and your technical skill. And I’m a big fan of black and white.

It’s just that in the case of these houses, the sameness is brought to a new qualitative realm by their limited color palette, a realm that speaks in a voice quite different from the uniformity of blue-and-white color of places like Santorini in Greece.

(One has to wonder why, so many decades after they were constructed, that so many of these houses remain in those few pastel hues.)

It’s sort of like a those blanket-cloth long coats worn when Monty Python members would dress as women - black and white doesn’t quite capture the flairless sameness that my eyes instantly noticed when we would go into a working district pub in England in the 1970s.

@mattblaze@federate.social @mattblaze@federate.social Black and white masks the limited range of pastel paints used on many of these houses, particularly in Daly City.

@mattblaze@federate.social Wow, it is so detailed that I can pick out Jack LaLanne, in handcuffs, swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco! Wow!

@mattblaze@federate.social Does William Powell (“The Thin Man”, 1934 film) live there?

@mattblaze@federate.social You need an astronomer’s adaptive lens with some sodium lasers to measure what real-time adaptations are needed.

@mattblaze@federate.social It does not get the full impact without the pastel colors of the houses.

@dwallach @mattblaze I have yet to experience from a digital photographic system the joy and excitement of watching an image emerge from a sheet of photographic paper as it sits in the developer tray.

@mattblaze@federate.social I dated Tracy back when I was at UCLA, but she did not look quite that spindly and her legs were not that long.

By-the-way, the town of Tracy is still there although it can be hard to find among the increasing number of giant distribution warehouses and trucking companies.

@mattblaze@federate.social My astronomer friends might disagree that atmospheric effects are greater the further the astronomical subject.

But aside from my poor (very poor) joke, has anyone doing terrestrial photography adopted the technique used by astronomers of using a laser beam to do real time measure of atmospheric conditions and use that either in real-time lens/mirror adaption or post processing?