Restaurant Bio in Paris

If you see the word bio on a restaurant in Paris, it's going to be organic and mostly vegetarian.

A couple of friends and I stumbled upon one of these restaurants today--Phyto Bar, Restaurant Bio.

I was so glad to to find a restaurant with a large selection of vegetables on the menu after passing so many restaurants where the focus was meat and potatoes.

The food at Phyto was delicious. The vegetables were fresh and lightly cooked.

And the special surprise were the healthy desserts, which consisted of fresh cooked fruit wrapped in a muffin like crust.

And everything was organic without with very little fat.

Making a Painting from a Photograph in Photoshop

Hello from Paris--Day 3

Right near the Trocadero subway stop is a neighborhood full of Art Nouveau architecture (organic style popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s).

I felt artful when I got back to my hotel so I changed the photograph to a painting.

You'd think you'd have to run the image through just one Photoshop filter, but that's not the case as you'll see below--

First I applied Edit>Transform>Skew to realign the image so it stands up and down (the vertical lines in the image stand 90 degrees from the x axis) instead of at an angle, which is the way it was originally shot. Then I applied the ink outlines filter and watercolors filter.

The picture at that point was too dark so then I adjusted the Levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels) by moving the center and right slider inward.

Last, the image didn't look detailed enough so I applied the Smart Sharpen Filter.

Inside the Subway Inside Paris 2

Hello from Paris! This is my second day here. I rode in the subway with my camera (a Sony DHC-H5 Cyber-shot) and caught the train zooming off from a station.

As you may have recalled if you're a faithful reader of my blog, I posted an explanation of the Paris subway system last October.

Today, I'm adding a map of the subway system.

I rode from Glaciere to the Trocadero. The Trocadero neighborhood is filled with museums and beautiful apartment buildings (more about that later).

Velib Bike Rental in Paris

Hello from Paris. The first thing I noticed since the last time I was here last year is the new Velib bike rental system. 

Riders take out a subscription (a fee paid by credit card right at the machine where the bike is). Subscriptions can be purchased by the day (1 euro), week (5 euros) or year (29 euros). 

After that, the bike rental is free for the first half hour and a couple more euros for subsequent 30-minute periods. 

I haven't used it yet, but plan to tomorrow.

Hope and Crosby

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby teamed up often-- on radio, on television and in movies. The two made On the Road to Singpore, the first of many "road" movies. There were seven of those from the 1940s to the 60s. The two played show business business men who were also shisters.

The movies were melodramtic and took place in exotic places. The films were successful because of the chemistry between Hope and Crosby.

The image above is a picture of a picture of Hope and Crosby recording a program on the radio. It was taken in a museum in Winslow, AZ.

Rialto, California and One Chemical

Rialto, California used to be a big citrus growing area.

You'd think a town like Rialto would be tiny. But it's not. There are 101,000 people living in this place that many have never heard of.

It's the town where I pick up the train to go to Union Station in L.A. and it's almost an hour away from my home in Palm Springs.

The big event there this past weekend was The Rialto Holiday On Ice, which was a fundraising reception to support Lindsay Davis, an ice skater who ranks 7th in National US Junior Figure Skating.

Rialto is located in San Bernardino County and is about 10 miles from the city of San Bernardino.

On Rialto's Web site, you can view streaming video of their city council meetings.

Oh, and Rialto has a big worry. There's perchlorate in the Rialto-Colton Groundwater Basin.

Perchlorate is the primary ingredient of solid rocket propellant, and it's in the tap water of the water supplies in many cities.

Here's what the EPA is doing about it: "EPA is currently undertaking efforts to help the Agency determine if regulation of perchlorate in drinking water would represent a meaningful opportunity for reducing risks to human health."

Hmmm

What is Creative Commons?

There's a great article posted on a blog today about creative commons.

Take a look at the little girl in the above picture. Then think about these questions.

1. Who owns the photo?
2. Who can use the photo?
3. Does Blogger (Google) have any interest in this photo?
4. What are the stipulations for use of this photo?
5. What would you have to do to protect the photo from others using it?

These are many questions that come to mind when you post a photo on blogger or on Flickr.

Flickr states: "Respect the copyright of others. This means don't steal photographs that other people have taken and pass them off as your own. (That’s what favorites are for.)"

What this implies is that you're free to link to other's photos but not free to borrow them if without linking back to his/her site/posting. But does this mean you should ask the person who took the photograph if you can use it? I say, absolutely!

Creative Commons sets guidelines for photographers to use with regard to the photos they post on the Internet.

"Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"

In other words they let you change the automatic* stipulation that any photographs you post are all-rights-reserved photos to other stipulations that you can choose from, "like some rights reserved."

*According to templetons.com, "all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not." This is known as the Berne Copyright Convention.

Moral of the Story: Read the fine print. Don't go posting on a site that lets them have your rights. And don't take others' photographs without asking!

Is Photography Dead? Consider the Process

Mamie Van Duren's blur erases her age. Photo by Matt Bamberg

Two shows are highlighted in Newsweek's recent article, "Is Photography Dead"

The show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 and the show at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Depth of Field" are two shows the show how photography has evolved since its inception.

Peter Plagens, the writer of the piece states that a "mimetic new medium" was formed in 1839 when a print was made from a negative. In other words he describes photography during that period as realism--real subjects and objects that the lens captures.

He then goes on to talk about the changes in photography that occurred when everyone started taking pictures with their Kodak Instamatic and Brownie cameras.

Last he moves to the postmodern days of Photoshop, image manipulation that's easy and, well...fake.

Basically Plagen's asserts with reservation that photography is an "easy" medium in which to work. You take a picture with your digital camera, and, if you frame it right, you might get posted on the Internet.

I think a point can be made that there is a difference between a photograph and a snapshot. One is planned from finding the right time, place of the shot to adjusting camera settings to framing and shooting. The other is a picture taken casually without much thought.

Plagens focuses on post-processing (using Photoshop) as the beginning of the end of photography.

It would be better to say that photography's last step (using Photoshop) is a small part of what a photographer does and when it is done it's no simple task.

The Gondolier

You've probably seen pictures of a gondola.

But have you ever taken a good look at the gondolier, the gondola's driver?

A gondola, if you don't know is a boat that gets you around the city of Venice.

The laws in Venice state that you have to have been born there to row a gondola.

The gondolier faces the bow and pushes with one oar.

Long ago, there used to be thousands of gondoliers rowing their gondolas, but today there are only a few hundred, and most of them serve the tourists.

Catch the Train in LA

You can catch a train up the coast or inland from the center of Los Angeles at Union Station.

Train travel in the United States is fragmented at best. While we don't have an extensive train network as vast as that of Europe, we do have one that suits the needs of the larger cities.

One doesn't think of Los Angeles as a place where one takes a train, but many people do as routes extend out like a spider from the city's Union Station.

Union Station opened in 1939 when at that time it carried 7000 passengers a day.

Today 26,000 ride the trains to and from the Inland Empire and up and down the coast.

You can catch the Los Angeles Metro to many places around the city, including Hollywood from Union Station.

Tokyo Rush Hour

Art Deco Signage in San Francisco

One of the century’s most innovative and popular designs, Art Deco was a style that spread across the globe in the 1920s and 30s and contained the same forward-looking architectural aspirations of the earlier Art Nouveau period (1890s to 1910s).

As time progressed less became more so that the ornamentation that lined the perimeters of signs disappeared from signs in the 50s and 60s.

Today in San Francisco, many of the Art Deco signs remain. I believe the city has the best collection of these signs in the world.

The Dot Building

The South of France is filled with architecture from the 60s and 70s. On a walk from the Old Town in Aix de Provence (town of about 100,000 with architecture from the 5th to the 18th centuries); to the outskirts of the city, there's a weird and wild building, which I like to call the dot building.

It was built in traditional mid-century modern style--long lines of concrete steel, glass, zig-zagging roof lines, outlined in some serious black and white.

The building is home to the Foundation Vasarely. It was designed by Victor Vasarely, who's considered the Father of Op Art.

If you're going the way of Provence, this building should not be missed.

Mission San Francisco de Solano

In 1869, King Charles III of Spain sent Father Junipero Serra to build a string of missions in California. By 1823 21 missions had been built. The Spanish friars and Indian tribes helped to build them.

Mission San Francisco de Solano (pictured above) was the last one built.

The Roman Catholic church set up each mission to convert people to Christianity. A convert was called a neophyte.

Russian fur traders shared their supplies and donated bells to Mission San Francisco de Solano in the 19th century.

Today the mission is part of the Sonoma town square. Sonoma is the center of Northern California's wine country.

Flower Sunday: How the Poinsettia Got Its Name

In Mexico, there was once a little girl who cried because she had no flowers to bring to a nativity scene in her town. An angel came and told her to pick a weed and plant it by the baby Jesus. She did and the small weed turned into a giant poinsettia.

In America the plant got its name from Joel Roberts Poinsett, a South Carolina doctor with an interest in botany who went on to be a U.S. ambassador to Mexico. When he traveled to Mexico, he saw a plant with bright red leaves and had it brought back to the United States.

When he got back to the U.S. he propagated the plant and had it sent out to some of his friends who were nurserymen. They ended up calling the plant a poinsettia, after Poinsett.

More About Self-Portraits

A couple of posts ago, I wrote directions for taking a self-portrait.

I didn't include the most obvious way to take a self portrait and that is taking a picture of yourself standing in front of a mirror or in front of some sort of reflective glass.

I didn't post my own self-portrait, either, because I couldn't locate the one I wanted to post.

But, alas, I found it and it's posted above.

Speaking of self-portraits there are two photographers that come to mind: Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In the 1980s Sherman took pictures of herself in a variety of situations, sometimes acting out scenarios where she appears puzzled or bewildered.

Also in the 1980s Robert Maplethorpe took portraits of himself in a variety of roles, some of them sexual and controversial.

We No Longer Need Weapons

After the shootings in Nebraska yesterday, perhaps the United States should do what Cambodia has done and put up billboards against violence.

This image was taken a few years ago in Siam Reap, Cambodia.

During the period from 1975-79 1.7 million people died in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge were responsible for the killings.

Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge in a campaign against people in urban areas. He moved people from the city to rural areas. Anyone against the regime was killed.

Pol Pot and his followers ended up killing 20 percent of Cambodia's population.

Digital Photography: How to Take Portraits and Self-Portraits

Candid portrait I took in Mexico

Everyone who’s anyone’s done it-made self-portraits or had had them shot or painted.

Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Dali, and Max Ernst all did.

It’s a simple process, really that documents your existence, and even more, it reveals your character, who you are at any given moment. It represents the likeness of a person that can be caught on canvas or in a photograph or sketched on paper, any of which can be scanned and made into digital art.

In 1932 Gilberte Brassai photographed Pablo Picasso and in 1944 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed Arnold Newman. Portraits entertain though the expressions of the subject. Some portrait artists collect images of the same person over a lifetime, some, like Cindy Sherman, photograph themselves.

As an artist you can choose who you want to create as your subject from the over-50 women of America’s Red Hat Society to young RAP singers or collect those of everyday people.

All you have to do is put your camera in auto or portrait mode and step back a bit from your subject, then zoom in to 80 mm focal length stepping back or forth until the image is clear when you press the shutter half-way down.

You can take your own self-portrait too--

1. Find a place to sit that's relatively clutter free both in front and in back. If you have to move a chair to the place go for it.
2. Check the lighting keep away from places where everything is casting a shadow.
3. Set your camera to portrait mode, look at the view finder and place the camera (use a tripod if you have to or a chair) so that it's pointing in the area where you will sit when it takes your picture.
4. Set the timer to the longest time there is. The timer shows up on your LCD screen as a clock (without a line crossed through it).
5. Place the camera where you want it (should be far enough so you have to zoom to 80mm to get the portrait) and click on the shutter.
6. Quickly move to the place that you found where you will pose for a picture.
7. After the camera takes the picture look at the LCD screen to see if your head and shoulders are comfortably in the frame. If not zoom in or out to where you think you will be in the frame.
8. Set the timer again and click the shutter.
9. Check to see if you're framed well.
10. Repeat steps 6 to 9, this time practicing a pose, say leaning forward in with your arms resting on your knee (a writer's pose).

Los Angeles History and Architecture Web Sites

The history of Los Angeles includes everything from the Gold Rush to modern architecture. A history of LA County can be found here.

One of the best Web sites about Los Angeles architecture is from you-are-here.com.
You wouldn't know by the URL that this Web site has a vast array of information from an interactive map of the city to pictures and info on just about every building in the city.

The site lists buildings by the decade in which they were built. For each decade there are dozens of buildings listed.

It also has categories for Theater and Movie palaces, Googie architecture and street photography.

The images aren't great, but they certainly are entertaining.

Babcock in Billings

The Art Deco theaters opened all across the country in the early twentieth century.

This is the Babcock Theater in Billings Montana. Movies are no longer shown there, but it is the place to see boxing.

The site of this theater was purchased by A.L. Babcock in 1889. Before this theater was built, there was an opera house on the property. The opera house burned down in 1906. Babcock went on to build a theater on the site. Fire destroyed the interior of the theater in 1935. It was rebuilt by a Californian right after the fire.