Vintage San Francisco

I’ve been having way too much fun with the Hipstamatic iPhone app, which produces the same kind of gritty, cracked, sepia-tinged photos you can get with “through the lens” photography, but for only $2.

All these faded pictures of San Francisco, they call to mind a lost city, a city painted in rose and perseverance — a romantic, tenacious rotogravure where Dashiell Hammett still overlooks Pine Street, Dirty Harry still stalks the Palace of Fine Arts and Herb Caen still takes constitutionals around Telegraph Hill, watching the fog curl under the Golden Gate Bridge and twist in eerie tendrils around Coit Tower.

The photo results remind me of those old pictures you dig out of your parents’ photo albums — time frozen, yellowed with age. There’s your dad, standing with a beer in his hand, his shirt off and his chest wet from yard labor. He has muscles. He looks so young. But why are his shorts so ungodly short? And when did your parents ever look so young and full of vigor anyway? In those aged, yellowed photos, a time stamp scrawled in robot-movie red across the bottom, you can find the answer. Twenty years before you were born.

And here’s a different photo, obviously taken from a different camera. Instead of yellow, the image is green, as if a gel was placed over the lens, offering an aura of peppermint to time. There’s your mom. She’s smiling. There’s a kid in her lap, a newborn with his eyes closed. With one hand your mom shows off the baby and with the other she holds up the neat bob falling in a shiny helmet off her head, as if to say life is full of miracles and contains multitudes: babies and hair-dos in one peppermint-scented moment in time. Life is good.

No matter how much you tinker with the different settings of this photo application, you can never exactly replicate a shot. The flash pops differently. The “film” cracks. You can put gels over the flash bulb or change out a lens. I’ve been taking photos for years and on a good day I am, at best, a mediocre photographer. I don’t have an eye and rarely remember the technical aspects that can turn the ordinary into art. So I’m dumbstruck to find the pocket technology I secretly hate — do you really need to check your email while on a date? Or driving? Or having coffee with a friend? — at the same time allows me to pretend to artistic talent. Life is good. And contains multitudes.

California Street, Cable Car

Ferry Building

OMG! An elevator!

Painted Ladies

I used to tell my daughter that King Kong lives at the top of this thing, and now she’s old enough to hound me for proof.

I cropped out Tim Burton’s latest to give it a more old-timey feel. I bet you could shoot this during the Film Noir fest and be really happy with the results.

Dolores Park and the city skyline.

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Welcome!

You can see a lot more vintage-ish photos over at the photo page, including more views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, cable cars, Union Square, Crissy Field, cityscapes, cool buildings and a lot more, including our burgeoning pirate army.

You can hear my NPR stories here or read my essays here, including the one about my bleeding penis. Or you can just take a look at Michael Jackson and Bubbles, the Laocoon’s unit and the Dukes of Hazzard outfit I found at a thrift store. Up to you. Enjoy. And thanks for stopping in.