cow.mooh.org

 
Just to the east of Potrero Hill, where I live in San Francisco, is the industrial waterfront suburb of Mission Bay/Dogpatch. The area used to be an old railyard area and still contains many factories and a working dockyard. It's being broken down and rebuilt as a biotech hub, along with a new UCSF campus and a whole pile of new condo housing.

Given the intermediate status of the area, it's satisfyingly quiet, urban and a bit run down, leading to some awesome opportunities for photos. I think I'm going to be spending my next few weekends poking around to see what I can see here.




There's an active flickr group with many photos of the area. In particular look out for photos by natu®e, who takes some awesome pictures of the area. Hes also a bit of a ninja with his iPhone pics too - very compelling stuff.




 
No trip to anywhere I go would be complete without some needless, surplus and redundant display of flagrant geekery. Thanks to fksr, I've been bitten by the 3D anaglyph photo bug.

In an effort to try to learn a bit more about the process, I went ahead and snapped left-right image pairs in different scenarios to try to learn what does and doesn't work in stereo.


The image above has a pretty strong separation between left and right, with a definite foreground, midground and background. I've chosen to register the images in the midground, and there the 3D effect is subtle and it seems to work reasonably well. However, in the extreme foreground, the separation is pretty huge and this causes the the car in the front right to oscillate unpleasantly.

fksr also points out that stereo elements right at the vertical edges of the frame are partially cut off in both eyes, which probably doesn't help in terms of resolving the picture as stereo.


This next image displays the same issues as the one here - the separation distance is pretty huge, so the foreground and background sections seem to also oscillate.


This image, taken from the plane window flying back to San Francisco, doesn't have the same issues as the first two. Here, there seems to be just a foreground and a background element, and a relatively small amount of shift. The 3D effect is less dramatic, but, to me at least, more effective.


As with the first flyover image, the 3D effect here is a less dramatic but more effective. Again, I'd argue that due to the simpler composition - background, foreground - it's less busy and the effect is more convincing. Plus, the more subtle separation between left and right helps.

So what have I learned? Well, so far it seems that for an effective image, separation distance is key, try to keep the image not too busy (i.e. having only a few elements that you want to 'pop' as 3D) and you must attempt to prevent your stereo components from intersecting the left and right parts of the image frame. Getting an effective 3D image, it seems, isn't just snapping left and right pairs - composition in the z-direction (i.e. ordering stuff in terms of depth) is also critical.
 

Towering over the The High Line in the Meatpacking district of NYC is the Standard Hotel, what at first glance (for me at least) was a breathtaking, cheesy remnant of 70's architecture. I was surprised to learn then that it was only finished in January 2009.

The spindly supports of the hotel sit over the park, with no easily apparent way of getting in. It's a truly impressive sight.


The High Line park is a converted section of elevated railroad that runs from downtown into Chelsea. Though it isn't completely open, you can wander along a large section of it. The tracks themselves have been preserved, with landscaped gardens interleaved into the concrete walkways. From it's height above ground, it's peculiarly peaceful and quiet.


The Meatpacking district in New York is absolutely packed with street art. All over the place you'll find murals and installations around many indoor galleries all the way up to Chelsea. I think it's safe to say that it was my favourite bit of town and I'm keen on getting a chance to visit again some time.

I'm not sure who is behind this mural but it seems to be at least partially derived from this picture. It seems that the murals do evolve (source: here).


The artist behind this one is D*Face; there's a time-lapse video of this mural going up here.


In an attempt to depose the incumbent Mayor, Michael Bloomerg, Monty Burns ran for the post. It's good to know that he didn't do too badly in the race.



Hugh Leeman who makes awesome, floating heads. I've found examples of his work in San Francisco as well (though I didn't know who was behind it at the time).


Invader installs tasty little space invader murals all over the world, documenting the effort. Next time I go I think I'll be keeping an eye out for these little guys :)

That's the end of this series for now. New York was an absolute eye-opener, a thriving, self-assured metropolis of truly gargantuan proportions. I'm looking forward to going again.
 

Just up the road from my cousin's place in uptown Manhattan is the George Washington Bridge, connecting Manhattan to New Jersey over the Hudson river. It's a two-deck suspension bridge, and it's the highest capacity bridge on the planet in terms of the amount of traffic it moves every year. More awesome: the bridge is also namesake of a character in the Marvel Comics Universe :)



The Little Red Lighthouse lives under the George Washington Bridge and is the subject of a children's book.


Turns out that New York City is riddled with fallout shelters. These shelters were nominated areas for people to gather in safety after a blast, and were selected by the government during the Cold War as part of the Community Fallout Shelter program. I'm not sure if the shelters themselves are still stocked and functional, but many of the signs still remain.



The Cloisters function as a museum located in Fort Tyron Park, uptown Manhattan. The museum was built in the forties as a branch of the Metropolitan museum and is a home to many thousands of pieces of medieval art.


The building itself is constructed from the remains of monasteries and cathedrals from that period in Europe, the name itself describing the many covered, partially open walkways that medieval monks would spend time in, playing corridor cricket, beer pong or simply in quiet meditation.

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