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Friday Slide Show: Two Redcoats at Fort Point
10 January 2025
We confess we've begun the new year housebound with a head cold that has persisted more than a few days. We're getting better with the help of a midday break that involves lying down on the bed. And now that we're feeling better, we sometimes indulge in a midday movie.
Yesterday it was The Man Who Cheated Himself from 1950. Of particular interest to us was that it was shot in San Francisco and the protagonists do a lot of driving around. We were surprised to recognize so much. Things didn't change as quickly then as they do now, apparently.
One thing that didn't change is Fort Point or, more properly, Fort Winfield Scott. It is named for Old Fuss and Feathers, who ran for president three times while commanding the U.S. Army from 1841 to 1861.
But around here we call it Fort Point.
Here's a tip for you: keep a text-based journal.
It's under the Golden Gate Bridge at water level and not on the adjacent cliffs. The idea was that cannon balls would be able to ricochet off the water to hit enemy ships at their water line. No cannon ball was ever fired in war from the fort, however.
Which is just how we like our forts.
Anyway, the movie reminded us of a visit we made years ago with a couple of miniature nephews who found that sort of thing fascinating. They were both wearing red hoodies that foggy day and we were testing a Konica Maxxum 7D just before the company sold its camera division to Sony.
We remembered a few of those shots, lying in bed, and roused ourselves to see if we could find them.
Here's a tip for you: keep a text-based journal. Ours goes back to 1989. An entry for very day. And we've written a Keyboard Maestro macro to search the whole thing or any range of years in sort of the same way Google lets you search the Internet.
So we looked for references to Fort Point in our journal and in the blink of an eye found them all. This particular visit occurred in 2005. And the images were nicely tucked away in a folder dated with the same year, month and day as our journal entry.
Very convenient.
Not as convenient was massaging the JPEGs we captured that day in today's Lightroom. It wasn't Lightroom's fault, which gave us the power of Adobe's Camera Raw to work on them. It was Konica's JPEG conversion, which pretty consistently blew out the highlights.
If we had shot Raw, we would have been able to claw some of that highlight information back into the picture. But these were JPEGs and that was baked in.
Still, we enjoyed walking through the old fort again even if you just might call us "the man who cheated himself" for not shooting Raw.
