Russell and Artist Catherine Widgery discussing video shots at the Warm Springs BART Station.

The lines between video and still photography are getting blurred every day.  Most good DSLRs (the cameras most of us use) are also video cameras.  The cameras with full frame sensors are now equipped with cinema-graphic lenses and sound gear to shoot broadcast-quality TV.  Much of what you see today on television is shot with Canon still cameras in video mode.  Working with our favorite videographer, Eric Sahlin, we have tip-toed into the world of video and drone photography with some excellent results.

Warm Springs BART Station

Generally speaking, buildings don’t move, but the camera can move around, through, and above a building creating remarkable imagery.  We recently completed two projects, one a video and the other a purely drone shoot that we want to share with you.  A finished video of an architectural project can be animated stills, live “B roll,” and drone footage spliced together in a seamless fashion.  Our video of the Warm Springs BART Station, done for Widgery Studio of Boston, was just that, a combination from all three sources.  All capture modes have their pluses and minuses as you can see in this video.  Some techniques, like time lapse, work best from live video while the drone may make the best long truck shots, and a slow pan shot may work best from a still image.  Working with stills and live footage can be a cost effective way to create a video for your website or PowerPoint presentation.

This movie, shot and edited by our partner Eric Sahlin, consists of live video, still image pans, and time-lapse footage.

340 Fremont Apartments

Drone photography has come a long way in the last five years.  They have gone from toys to professional tools.  The crafts are much more stable, the lenses better, and the sensor resolution greatly improved.  Recently we shot 340 Fremont Apartments for our client Equity Residential.  The Fremont St. tower is sandwiched in with a dozen other high rises on Rincon Hill and presented some photographic challenges that were best solved with a drone.  We were able to station the drone 75 yards in front of the building and create a boom shot that rose close to 400 feet in slow motion.  Breathtaking!  And my partner on this project, videographer Eric Sahlin says that the crafts are only getting better with higher resolution cameras and real video shutters.  BTW, Eric has taken the time to get the FCC operator’s license so we are completely legal.  Sometimes, a drone shot may be your best alternative with a tricky building shoot.

340 Fremont Apartments. Drone video photographed and produced by Eric Sahlin.

One Henry Adams Apartments, San Francisco, CA. BAR Architects.

Many years ago when working for a major housing developer based in the mid-west, I asked why all their projects were located on the coasts and none in the mid-west or south.  His answer surprised me: “We like to operate in high-barrier entry markets and California is just such a place.”  It is not any one thing that drives costs and rents, but a combination of circumstances that make the Bay Area the most expensive housing market in the country.  Needless to say, many developers are jockeying for a piece of the multi-family pie with former rail yards, industrial sites and strip malls being transformed into trendy housing for millennials and whomever else can afford it.

In the past year or so, we have been fortunate to shoot a handful of projects executed by some well established architectural firms both in the heart of the city and on suburban turf.  Because space is at a premium, the design paradigm has shifted to small units with some upscale amenities (washer and dryers in each unit) and large, multi-function common spaces that any ex-frat boy or start-up entrepreneur could warm up to.  Game and TV rooms, lounges with demonstration kitchens (just in case Martha Stewart shows up) roof top decks, hot tubs and bike repair shops. Ground floor retail is increasingly being integrated into the design adding a significant convenience factor to the project.  Under the same roof can be your gym, your favorite coffee shop and a boutique supermarket.  Here are two interesting projects fresh out of the camera.

One Hundred Grand Apartments

One Hundred Grand Apartments, Foster City, CA. Seidel Architects.

One Hundred Grand is Foster City’s attempt to put on an urban face on an otherwise antiseptic suburban landscape. Located just off the west side of the San Mateo Bridge, it is a sophisticated urban oasis in a suburban environment.  Alex Seidel of Seidel Architects mixes town house city living with five story urban block development on a tight site in the middle of Foster City.  An expansive central courtyard with gardens, a large pool and outdoor fireplace creates a buffer to the intense urbanized exterior.  A rich mix of natural and man-made materials helps give the project curb appeal.

One Henry Adams Apartments

Our client Equity Residential, hired us to shoot One Henry Adams. The building is in the heart of the San Francisco Design District and next to two iconic brick warehouse buildings that are still used as design center showrooms.   When San Francisco was still a port city, this neighborhood was mostly warehouses and light industrial.  Henry Adams, the urban developer and recycler, changed all that about 40 years ago by turning the abandoned warehouses into a vibrant center for interior design showrooms.  One Henry Adams reflects some of its converted industrial neighbors by sitting on a half story tableau that was originally a loading dock and now is a pedestrian walkway.  The project is divided into two six-story blocks with a handsome broad courtyard between the two and is street accessible.  A second story community room opens onto an internal courtyard and allows ample space for you and 300 of your closest friends to party the night away (or until someone calls the cops.)

One Henry Adams Apartments, San Francisco, CA. BAR Architects.

BAR Architects of San Francisco mixed brick, stucco, Trex and shallow bays to give the facades a sophisticated urban look while not conflicting with its historic neighbors.  Each building has its own rooftop garden with downtown or waterfront views, a great place to take your date after a night on the town or just unwind after a long day in front of the computer.

Sky Cycles public art project by Catherine Widgery. Installed at the Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, CA.

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) wanted to make a definitive architectural statement when they commissioned the Warm Springs Station. It may seemingly sit in the middle of a bean field, but that won’t be the case for long.  Right now, Warm Springs in Fremont is the end of the transit system’s line and BART wanted to make it an elegant terminus.  Robin Chiang & Company won the architectural design competition and our client, the internationally acclaimed artist, Catherine Widgery, won the competition to create all the environmental art at the station.

Sky Cycles public art project by Catherine Widgery. Installed at the Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, CA.

Most of Widgery’s projects are large in scale and many use glass in some innovative way.  The last project we did for her were a set of illuminated glass murals 40 feet high and over two hundred feet long that adorned and upscale mall in Canada’s capital.  Chiang’s original design was a gigantic glass funnel that served as the entrance. The funnel morphed into a forty foot glass drum which became Widgery’s primary canvas.  Most of Widgery’s work exploits the dualities of materials, and “Sky Cycles” at Warm Springs is no exception.

The BART station rotunda is both a mirror and a stained glass painting of the skies and hills that surround the station.  The artwork is kiln fired on each panel of glass and is permanent.  The alternating bands in the rotunda panels are made of a reflective/transparent material.  Sometimes there is reflection and sometimes we see through these vertical bands between the painted sky, depending on where the light is greater.   The effect is subtle and it may take the average commuter many trips through the station before they see the effect, but it is all part of the design.  Big art helps make a small station a big deal.

Sky Cycles public art project by Catherine Widgery. Installed at the Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, CA.

A Big House for Some Big Apparatus

Engine No. 11, an Oshkosh 8X8 Striker, has a 630 gallon tank on board filled with fire-fighting foam.

What do you do with a couple of fire engines that are the size of two Greyhound buses, have tires four feet high and can unload 630 gallons of foam in 60 seconds?  You build a place to park and service them close to an airport runway so that they can be ready to go in a split second.  SFO is a busy place, the fourth busiest airport in the United States.  Close to 400,000 planes a year take off and land and over 50 million people embark or disembark annually from the airport.   That is enough traffic for the airport to support three fire stations housing eighteen pieces of apparatus and a 24/7 crew of firefighters trained to handle any emergency, from an onboard medical situation to a full-scale runway conflagration.

Fighting airplane fires is very specialized and the equipment used is the same.   FireHouse 3, designed by Shah Kawasaki Architects of Oakland in joint venture with YAMAMAR Design, is much more than a garage for oversized fire fighting apparatus.  It is a firehouse designed for the very specific needs of airport fire safety.

Among its unique features, the building has a command center with a panoramic view of both runways. It also has its own foam fill delivery system with a 1600 gallon tank, and an oxygen tank fill station. The building’s windows are triple glazed to absorb the runway roar just yards from its bays. And there’s a special HVAC system to filter out jet exhaust.  FireHouse 3 is a big house to handle big emergencies.

FireHouse 3, at San Francisco International Airport.

Pacific Telephone offices, 1985.

Standing in an orderly row like the Royal Palace Guard are twelve four drawer file cabinets filled with over 25 years of photography.  From proof sheets to black and white prints to 4×5 original film, these file cabinets hold the archive of my professional life until 2006 when I switched from film to digital.  Buried in the files are maybe twenty to thirty buildings each for firms like Kaplan McLaughlin, HOK and Gensler among countless one off projects for firms either long gone or architects and designers regretfully deceased.  There are a few file drawers full of amazing houses shot for some of the best magazines of the era and a prodigious collection of decorator show-houses from the 1980s to 1999.

Napa Valley House for Architectural Digest. Architecture by Kevin Roche, 1991.

We have decided to do some house cleaning.  Not everything I photographed in 1985 was wonderful.  A lot of it was just compromised work that took every ounce of my creative spirit to make look good.  We drew a line at 1995.  Everything before that date would get a keen eye for its historic, aesthetic or commercial value.  If it met any of those criterion, we kept it. Otherwise, it went into the recycle bin.  We archived the remaining images in the hope that some library, university or museum in the future may find them as interesting as we do.  Film from 1995 to 2006 will stay in the file cabinets and digital files live on two separate hard-drives and an optical drive.

We are still in the middle of this project with stacks of film-laden banker boxes sitting in the studio.  After going through about half the boxes I have reached a few easy conclusions.  First, film was just an awful medium.  Getting it right was always a challenge.  Film had its own rules and if you tried to break them, there was often hell to pay.   I think the reason I shot so many office interiors in the 1980s was because I figured out how to work with Ektachrome in fluorescent lit environments and not have everything look a sickly pale green.  I also knew how to light spaces with both flash and hot lights.  That was necessary when shooting film.

Box Tree Inn, E. 49th St, NYC for Country Inns Magazine, 1989.

Second, styles change, decade by decade.  The trendy Post Modern interiors of the 80s and 90s look almost comically silly today.  They may come back in 30 years.  Who knows? Classic design, whether Modern or Traditional still looks good.  I am posting a few residential and hospitality jobs shot over thirty years ago that still hold up to a critical eye.  Amazingly, most of the Ektachrome is as vibrant as the day it was shot.  It has not deteriorated.  Kudos to Eastman Kodak for that.

Santa Cruz Imports. Interiors by Brown Matarazzi, 1985.

Santa Cruz Imports. Interiors by Brown Matarazzi, 1985.

Gradually, I became a better photographer.  The images shot in the early 1990s looked significantly better than the ones in the early 1980s.   Slowly, the compositions improved, the lighting refined, the colors more natural.  Today the digital world has opened up possibilities that were almost impossible then.  From drone shots, to layering of exposures, to painting out annoying exit signs and smoke alarms, our ability to create the “perfect image” is almost a click away.   The “good old days” of film were not that good, but that doesn’t prevent us from waxing nostalgic.

ASID Marin Showhouse, 1994.

On My Day Off

Somewhere in the basement in a box of memorabilia is a report card from my first grade teacher with a two sentence note stating that Russell needed some help in reading, but he was the best artist in the class.  The fine arts have always been a part of my life.  I think I took as many art and design classes as I did architecture ones at Berkeley.  It has been many years since I picked up a paintbrush or a charcoal stick, but just last year I decided to start drawing again.  When I was younger, painting was both craft and catharsis.  Now when I draw, it is just creative pleasure.  I am still rusty and I know enough not to quit my day job.  As I stare at my easel in a class at the local art center, I am thoroughly impressed by the level of skill and artistry of my fellow classmates, all mature adults with busy lives.  Whether a one minute gesture or an hour-long pose, my mind is completely engaged in finding and creating beauty.  Does this indulgence into fine art make me a better photographer?  I hope so.

Jazmin House. Architecture: Alejandra Cisneros / Studio Magnolia.

There is an old joke among photographers about getting the phone call for a dream assignment in Tahiti.  The usual response is, “I am still waiting.”  In my thirty-year plus career, I have been luckier than most photographers in getting overseas assignments, usually for U.S. cruise ship and hotel companies.  But photography has changed a lot in the last ten years with digital imaging being a large part of it.  While traveling has always been integral to shooting architecture, there are significantly more shooters around the world and many are doing good work.  So when the phone call came for a month long shoot, not in Tahiti but Bali, Indonesia, I was somewhat amazed. Bali is a tropical island in the Indian Ocean and roughly eight thousand miles from San Francisco.  Once I got over the initial elation, I realized there was a lot of work to do before we left.  The electrical grid in Indonesia is 220 VAC.  None of our U.S. based 110 VAC lighting would work.  We also needed a way to download, store and process images on location on a daily basis using the local power for all of our devices.

Nina House. Architecture: Alejandra Cisneros / Studio Magnolia.

Our lighting solutions came from a Lithium battery powered flash system that could be charged with either 220 or 110 VAC power.  All of our lights, stands, light modifiers and tripod fit into one case weighing less than 23 kg.  Using a Macbook Pro with an SSD drive and an auxiliary hard-drive, we put together an al fresco processing station in the guest house that became our location studio in the jungle.  Every morning our cheery driver would meet us there and ferry all our gear either on foot or by motor scooter several hundred meters to his waiting mini-van where we would be driven to the day’s shoot. Our guest house was located on a narrow footpath with only motor scooter access.  To my astonishment, our 23 kg lighting case was often carried on the heads of our local female helpers.  Once on location, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a small team of helpers would appear with plates of tropical fruits and copious amounts of local coffee, not to mention the mid-morning fresh coconut with straw.  Fortunately our days ended early, usually with a tropical thundershower that would roll in around five. At which point, we would reverse the process and spend a few hours reviewing the day’s work, then catch a late dinner in one of the town’s fun eateries.

Flora Villas. Architecture: Alejandra Cisneros / Studio Magnolia.

In just under a month, we completed all the images for a monograph about the work of Alejandra Cisneros, a local ex-pat American architect and two stories for a regional travel magazine. Working with Cisneros was delightful. She organized a small army of helpers who magically appeared whenever we needed something or needed to be somewhere. Her houses are a rich blend of traditional Indonesian vernacular design, antique, recycled building parts and a healthy dose of Modernism.  We also managed a couple of beach days.

top left: Marguerite House, Ubud, Bali, top right: Penestanan motor-bike path, lower: Tegalalang Rice Terrace, Bali.

Even for Southeast Asia, Bali is unique.  It is both a physical and cultural island in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago.  The Balinese are proudly Hindu, and that ancient religion and culture is ubiquitous.  Seeking and creating beauty is one of the paths to holiness in Hinduism, a value ingrained in most Balinese.  Urban ugliness gives way to serene bucolic beauty at every turn.  There is a reason why Bali is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

ARMA Resort, Ubud, Bali.

340 Fremont Apartments, from Equity Residential.

Since its invention in France in 1848, verisimilitude has been one of the key values of photography.  Photographs are compelling because they convey a sense of reality, no matter how ephemeral.  It is the magical first light of dawn or the “blue hour” that always captures our imagination.  We are keenly aware of this when shooting architecture, no matter what the environment.  The introduction of both Photoshop and sophisticated rendering software has thoroughly blurred the edges of Truth.  There are many times when my assistant and I visually dissect a well done digital rendering looking for signs of its fabricated reality.  The other side of this visual enigma is creating a hyper-reality with a photographic image in Photoshop.

340 Fremont, before and after retouching. View from Rincon Hill.

Last month we were hired by Equity Residential to photograph 340 Fremont, their newest high-rise on Rincon Hill in San Francisco.  The building, although strategically placed near the top of one of San Francisco’s legendary hills, was visually crowded by its urban competitors. Getting a clean, unobstructed shot of this shiny tower was almost impossible.  The planning commission probably got carried away permitting almost ten 40+ story residential towers to be built in very close proximity on that hill.  Our only solution was to use some P.S. tools to gently ease away a few competing structures and re-foliate a row of newly planted street trees.  The question, of course, is where is the ethical line drawn between truth and mendacity?

340 Fremont, before and after retouching. View from Lansing St.

I am hired to make my client’s work look great. I take that role seriously. I also try not to fake reality. Removing an ugly power pole or painting in a bluer sky is not an ethical breach.  Changing the form of the actual structure, is.  Here, we tried to free the building from its impinging neighbors.  Note that we did not add an extra ten stories onto the building or change its color to pink.  We just gave it some breathing room.  Just to help things along, in Tannhäuser like fashion, we made leaves sprout on dormant tree limbs.  And you thought only Wilhelm Richard Wagner, the great German operatic composer could do that. Hah!

Reconnecting Over a Plate of Pasta

Il Fornaio, Santa Clara, CA.

I have always been fascinated with hospitality spaces.  They seem to exude creativity and warmth that other building types lacked.  As a designer or architect, you could let your imagination run in a restaurant or hotel lobby in a way that would be prohibitive in any other scenario.  Early on in my career, I started shooting restaurants in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles that would become the backbone of my nascent photo career.  We always worked late at night with intense tungsten lighting, long exposures and pristine, people-free spaces.  Today, digital photography has allowed us to shoot during daylight hours using both strobe and daylight and introduce people once again.  What a change!

Il Forniao, Santa Clara, CA.

Recently, we were hired by the Irvine Company to shoot the opening of Il Fornaio, at Santa Clara Square, their massive hundred acre development in Santa Clara.  Ironically, the owners of Il Fornaio have been in the restaurant business for many years and were some of my first hospitality clients in San Francisco in the early 1980s.  Still the same family ownership and a wonderful, if unexpected reunion with the pioneering owners, Larry Mindel and his son, Michael.

Hotel Alise, San Francisco.

Pineapple Hospitality is a boutique hotel group based in Seattle.  They have been expanding up and down the west coast. Their first hotel in San Francisco, Hotel Alise, is an early Twentieth Century classic just off Union Square where they are making a serious effort rehabbing and rebranding it.  We were asked to create a series of images that would “break the mold” for boutique hotels and create some “sex appeal” for the place.

I am pretty familiar with the hospitality business here and around the United States.  One of my first assignments as a young photographer for Sunset Magazine thirty years ago was to do a story on Bed and Breakfast Inns around the Bay.  Bill Lane, the publisher, had a fit when he noticed the two people I photographed in bed having breakfast were not married. Oops!  The retouch department dutifully painted on wedding rings.  Since that fitful being I have gone on to photograph countless hotels in San Francisco and around the West Coast.  In the early nineties, I developed Royal Caribbean as a client. Over the next decade, I photographed close to ten major cruise ships just out of dry dock and sailing on maiden voyages worldwide.  Over the course of my career I have photographed almost every major hotel in San Francisco, the most memorable was the opening day at the Marriott Marquee that was welcomed that day by the largest earthquake in one hundred years.

The hotel business although glamorous, is a tough one. Your fixed costs are pretty well set, whether you have one guest or a full house.  Larger establishments can drive revenue from food and beverage, but at the end of the day, the best you can do is fill up the house at a good rate.  Having your hotel in a convention and event rich city like San Francisco is an added bonus.

Fortunately for this shoot, key executives plus their marketing department were in town to look over our shoulders, run for coffee and pull all kinds of rabbits out of the hat, or in this case, hats out of the box.  We had two goals in mind: 1. To provide basic descriptive imagery for the online booking sites, 2. To create a series of evocative, story telling images that helped build a new brand identity for the property. With a rich selection of high-end props and lots of imagination, we created a series of fantasy vignettes that would appeal to a seasoned traveler looking for a weekend getaway.  Back in the studio, we did a bit of Photo Shop magic to make things look a bit different.  It’s always fun working with a client who wants to “push the envelope” or in this case, tear it open.  The client, needless to say, loved the shots and very quickly populated their websites with the images.   It is always fun when we get to work with a client who wants to challenge our creativity and have us create a set of pictures that jump off the screen.

Refining a Mid-Century Modern Classic

We were pleased to see a project we photographed and promoted, the Oak Ridge House in Berkeley, published as the “House of the Month” in September’s Architectural Record, both print and digital.  This house was the original work of John Ekin Dinwiddie. Built in 1949, it is classic Mid-Century Modern easily ten years ahead of its time.  The new owners hired architects Olson Kundig of Seattle to do a remodel. They added family living spaces at the rear while faithfully keeping the core gallery space unchanged.  Alward Construction, one of the Bay Area’s best know historic remodeling specialists, did the superb job of bringing this somewhat tattered classic back to life.

Time’s Shadow, by Catherine Widgery. CF Rideau Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

Public art was once limited to heroic bronzes that ceremoniously decorated the town square or filled up less trafficked corners of our public parks in “Where’s Waldo” like fashion. Not anymore. Public art is now a required component of many large-scale architectural projects and even part of simple urban renewal schemes and urban facelifts. Even though most of our work revolves around photographing buildings inside and out, in the last few years we have developed two clients who create architecturally scaled public art. One is based here in California and the other in Boston. Although their styles are different, they are both academically trained artists and their primary medium is glass. And they are both women.

Catherine Widgery

Catherine Widgery is a sculptor who has worked in a variety of mediums and has only started doing large-scale work in glass in the last decade.  Her projects can be found around the United States and Canada either as freestanding pieces or integral parts of buildings both public and private.  This month Catherine invited us to Ottawa to photograph the CF Rideau Centre, a major retail destination in Canada’s capital that featured one of her largest pieces to date.  It is almost impossible to describe Widgery’s work in a few sentences because almost every piece she creates is completely unique and truly designed for its site-specific environment.  Widgery is a conceptual artist / sculptor whose creations are intellectually challenging, dramatic, symbolic, humorous, and often relying on the time of day and the aspect of the sun to expose their most dramatic views.  Time’s Shadow is a two layered mural with one face of ceramic tile and the other exterior one of fritted plate glass. The mural is a weave of seasonal landscapes and skies that are animated by the parallax effect of the fritted glass.  The mural is huge, taking up almost an entire city block on the busiest commercial street in Ottawa.  It is noteworthy that the mural is on a commercial building, rather than a public one signifying the developer’s commitment to large-scale public art.

Ellen Blakeley

Ellen Blakeley is a Bay Area artist who has moved from ceramics to glass.  Ellen started out as a ceramicist with degrees in art from Mills College.  About ten years ago she discovered the joys of using recycled safety glass as her primary design ingredient. She started by scouring the streets of San Francisco retrieving shattered safety glass from broken car and bus shelter windows.  She took them back to her studio where she painted the backsides of the glass and then built intricate mosaics with the recycled material.  Using a cementitious support strata, the artwork can be quite scalable, with her murals reaching as high as 12 feet.  Her pieces range from individual decorative tiles used in residential applications to large scale murals for hospitals, banks and hospitality spaces.

The beauty of the work lies in the nature of the safety glass crackle pattern that catches and reflects light in a variety of ways giving even simple designs an extra sparkle and depth.  While visiting her studio she showed us a tile where she integrated silver leaf and white paint on the glass back to create a leaf pattern design.  The effect was quite beautiful.

 Last year my wife and I visited Santa Fe to get in touch with the great art scene in that historic city.  We noticed an unusually large amount of bronze sculpture almost on every corner.  Then we discovered the Shidoni Foundry, just outside of town.  Shidoni is possibly the largest bronze foundry in the United States.  It was quite exciting to take a tour of the actual working studios and see how the casting process was done.  As classic and beautiful as bronze sculpture is, new materials and certainly new ideas about just what public art is have added a new dimension to the public square.   Artists such as Widgery and Blakeley are rethinking our relationship to urban spaces and art making our cities better places for it.  

Curving Planes House by Sage Architecture.

This is the “Architecture is Fun” edition of our monthly newsletter and what is more fun than looking at remarkable and innovative houses designed by terrific architects! Over the course of my long career I have been fortunate to have photographed the work of the West Coast’s leading residential architects.  Recently, we have shot a group of single-family houses that push the envelope both aesthetically and technically. We have provided links to larger web galleries if you want to look at more images of the work.

Curving Planes House

Pam Whitehead and Paul Almond, the principals of Sage Architecture, run a small office in Sacramento that does amazing work.  I first became aware of their firm while shooting a handful of modernist mountain houses in the Lake Tahoe area. They have done great work there and in their more familiar Central Valley environs. The Curving Planes house was designed for a scientist and his family in the Davis area, fairly close to the University of California where he runs a research program. Curving Planes sits in an upscale subdivision just outside the Davis city limits populated by an unremarkable collection of merchant-built mcmansions. The family wanted an architecturally distinctive house, but one that could accommodate the intense summer heat that dominates this region.  In order to minimize the solar heat gain, Sage stretched the curving roof lines so that the eaves become sun shades on the west and south faces. 18 foot ceilings in the main living space create a natural draft for summertime cooling. Click here to view more images in a Flash gallery.

 Oak Knoll House

Not everyone can afford to build their dream home in the heart of the Napa Valley and often, when they can, their aspirations far exceed their taste. With the Oak Knoll house, that was not the case.  Here, a Silicon Valley software developer and entrepreneur had the budget, the property to build on and the good sense to hire a world class architect. The owner chose Bob Swatt of Swatt | Miers Architects to design his 6000 square foot glass and stone Wine Country estate.  Swatt gave the house a limestone clad core and then cantilevered the main structure 30 feet off its hillside perch giving it a F.L.W. Falling Water sense of deja vu. Strong horizontal rooflines are sheathed in Brazilian hardwoods and reach well beyond the glass curtain walls facing the surrounding vineyards. Sitting in the living room, one can look out at acres of some of America’s most valued vineyards and dream of the wine that they will produce at the end of the season. Click here to view more images in a Flash gallery.

PLUShouse

High above Oakland sits a modest house sandwiched between five other houses on an impossible lot with a view to die for.  The PLUShouse, designed by architect Lindy Small packs as much design sense in 2100 square feet as you can imagine. The house makes its own electricity and saves and reuses much of its water in a rainwater recycling system.  Ten foot high windows and doors frame a magnificent panorama of San Francisco Bay and its surrounding cities.  Deep roof overhangs and louvered shades regulate afternoon and summer sun providing a comfortable ambient temperature year round. Clever, recessed LED lighting gives brilliant illumination with energy efficient ease. This house will be on the AIA East Bay Home Tours in August.

Mid-Century Modern remodel, Berkeley, CA.

For the last six or seven years, most pro level digital cameras have also doubled as video cameras. Professional videographers have taken to using cameras like the Canon 5D, to shoot high end video productions.  Many commercials you see on TV and even some TV dramas are now being shot with DSLRs.  The cameras are outfitted with serious video quality lenses and sophisticated audio and recording devices that enable the videographers to produce 1080p broadcast quality results. Still-photography is not video. There are a different set of sensibilities in shooting video and stills. After all, video is designed to record subjects that move. But cameras can also move and that is where video and architecture can meet.  Recently we have been working with our close video associate, Eric Sahlin, to see how we could integrate stills and video as a service for our clients.  We asked the question, what would happen if you could put the camera on wheels and move it through a building?  Doing this is a bit more complicated than it appears since the tripod and camera need to be on a track and carefully moved on that track, but if done right,  the results can be quite compelling. The visual effect is as if one is actually walking or driving through a space. The advantage of short “truck shots” as they are called in the movie industry, is that they can be dropped into web pages as MP4 or GIF files in much the same way as photographs are.  Recently, we had the good fortune to shoot an Olson Kundig remodel of a classic Mid-Century Modern house for Alward Construction.  We asked Eric to set up some truck shots to use as samples of video truck shots of architecture. Below are two very short videos that illustrate this capability.

Truck Shot of Mid-Century Modern, exterior. Video by Eric Sahlin Photography for Russell Abraham.

Truck Shot of Mid-Century Modern, interior. Video by Eric Sahlin Photography for Russell Abraham.

The advantage of these videos is that they are compact files that can be easily downloaded on a website and viewed along with other media, like still-photography and illustrations. We have only started playing with this concept but believe it could be a strong addition to a design firm’s visual media. Let us know what you think. Video could be in your firm’s future.

Photoshop Alternatives

Edited image using Pixlr Express.

Corel PaintShop workspace.

Adobe Photoshop is 25 years old and the granddaddy of image editing programs. We use it almost everyday and is a key part of our business.  Photoshop is vast, complex, not intuitive and expensive. It is the tool for imaging professionals. If you are not an imaging professional (photographer, graphic designer, or illustrator) Photoshop could be a lot more program than you really want to deal with. There are a bunch of editing programs available that can do much of what P.S. does that are free or almost so and offer a legitimate alternative to Adobe’s mothership. Here is a quick review of four of them.

GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor that has much of the look and operational characteristics of its Adobe brother. It will do most of things Photoshop will.  It has most of the same tool icons and a very similar functionality.  It is for PC and Linux operating systems only. Sorry Mac.

PaintShop Pro by Corel has been around for almost as long a Photoshop.  It costs about $70 and will probably pay for itself the first week you use it. The command structure is a bit different than P.S., but it is a fully functional image editing program with the capabilities of doing layers and masks and sophisticated cutouts.  This program is a good alternative to P.S. but it will take some time to learn.

Pixlr is a cloud-based editing program that has two modules, Editor and Express. Editor is robust, with many Photoshop functions like layers, a comprehensive tools palette, and the ability to transform and warp. Express is easy and fun to use, but not exactly a professional tool. This module is a bit like Instagram, something you can use to edit your iPhone images to send to friends, but not really a full featured application.  It is an online application and you can be up and running with it pretty quickly.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is basically “Photoshop for Dummies.”  It is amazingly full featured and has a command structure that is very close to its big brother, Photoshop. If you are familiar with Photoshop, Elements is simple to learn.  Elements doesn’t have the strong graphics or sophisticated controls needed in print production, but for simple editing tasks like changing contrast or color balance or cutting out objects, it works fine.  Elements is about $100 from the usual places.

All of these programs work well and can do a majority of what Photoshop does simply and cheaply, but they all have a learning curve that could be a few afternoons of dedicated online tutorials or a few weekends of classes.  It is not worth buying any of these programs unless you are willing to put in the time to learn how to use them.  These are image editing programs and image cataloging programs.  I will write about those programs in an upcoming newsletter.