Posts made in October, 2012

A couple of months ago, I had a call from SRI International looking for hiring a photographer for their new website. SRI is a not-for-profit research center in Menlo Park, CA and they are responsible for some amazing inventions including the mouse, HDTV, and recently SIRI. SRI was building a new website to present the different research projects and they wanted to have one image per project. Each image had to encapsulate the vision and the goal of what the project was about. I was assigned to work with the Artificial Intelligence Center (the folks behind the first version of SIRI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not very sexy and visual (unless Apple does it). We started with a lot of back and forth between the project manager, the art director and myself on...

The second round of America’s cup World Series was held in San Francisco from October 2nd to October 7th 2012. This is not the official America’s cup (or even the Louis Vuitton’s cup) but a new way for sailors to get trained while they wait for their boats to be built. This was the round 2 of the series, with an impressive win in both categories (match racing and fleet racing) by Jimmy Spithill on Oracle Team USA Spithill. It’s true his crew trains all the time on the bay, but Ben Ainslie (on JP Morgan Team), who was new to the AC45, showed that it was possible to beat Oracle Team USA in San Francisco as his crew won one of the fleet races. I tried several locations to get shots of the races. On Tuesday, I was using a helicopter and...

Fleet week this year was celebrating its 31th year running. Wikipedia article estimates that the event attracts over 1 million people to watch the airshow along the San Francisco bay. This year was no exception. I went as usual on Thursday to photograph the Blue Angels first practice run. The weather was largely overcast and I had some issues with my lens, so I have only a few images from Thursday (the only one which made the cut, has a 25% grey background). But Saturday I went sailing and I got great images, including a F-22 raptor, a stealth bomber (B-2 Spirit Bomber) and images of the Blue Angels with San Francisco in the background. Shooting from a moving boat has made getting a sharp shot a more challenging exercise. Fortunately, the planes are making...

This weekend was probably the busiest weekend in San Francisco in a very long time. At the same time, we had the America’s cup world serie, Fleet week, Castro Street, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Italian Heritage Parade in North Beach,  a playoff between the Giants and the Reds and a football game between the 49ers and the Buffalo. Generally, simply Fleet Week is crazy. This year it was overwhelming, and everyone was in San Francisco. I tried to escape the crowd somehow by getting on the water. The bay was really packed but still manageable. The good news is that the weather was very sunny and it has allowed me to take some new images of San Francisco that I was never able to get before. Sailing the bay is definitely something you should do if you...