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Friday Slide Show: Oyster Point Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

28 November 2014

We were early for an appointment one morning earlier this week in Oyster Point, so we took a walk around. Oyster Point is an industrial park in South San Francisco, designed for vehicles and cubicles not shoes and camera bags. But we had just learned of Lewis Baltz's death and thought we'd try our hand at photographing what doesn't catch the eye.

Oyster Point. Concrete and trees.

There was a little fall color, a bit past its prime. We wouldn't have bothered but we felt like the flora was a foil, part of the crime scene, so we framed a few trees. Looking back at the collection, we seemed to have an even match between the buildings and the trees.

Sight lines were the big attraction as we composed the images. Catching a backhoe at work on a dumpster, it was the alignment of the other dumpsters along an uneven concrete wall that attracted us more than the action. And the waves of weeds hitting that wall in the foreground echoed the line of red plastic flags in the distance.

The gardeners were working the same shift as we were, tending some exotic plants. We took a few close ups, cropping in even further in post production. They had a slighter warmer bias than the cooler buildings.

Several of the shots were directly into the sun. In one of them the sun actually makes an appearance. We don't usually do that. But we were shooting Raw and thought we'd see what we could do with that in Lightroom 5.7. A good deal, it turned out, bringing out detail in the shadows and recreating the feeling we had of the harsh early morning light.

There is some glare in those. And while we were sorely tempted to open them in OpticsPro 10 just to knock out the glare, we didn't. Because, well, there was glare.

Not just the gardeners were out, though. At a printing plant, gondolas and cans of paper waste were being recycled. There was quite a bit of it, which cheered us. Printing plants have been closing left and right so it was nice to see one not just in business but busy with three shifts six days a week.

We hardly walked around the corner before it was time to retrace our steps. There's a great deal more to Oyster Point than we're showing but there was enough in our field of view to play Baltz for 15 minutes.

Not the depressing desolation and devious machinations of Baltz's world, no. Nor a black and white world. But one of dried and fallen leaves on manicured lawns surrounding concrete and glass buildings where the work of the world was going on.


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