April 24, 2023: Angel Island State Park, the largest natural island in the San Francisco Bay, offers some of the best views of the surrounding Bay Area. With great hiking trails and many other recreational opportunities readily available, Angel Island is truly a hidden gem in the midst of the urban Bay Area.
Beginning with the earliest inhabitants, the Coast Miwok, Angel Island was a seasonal hunting and gathering location for the local native tribes, a safe refuge and supply stop for Spanish explorers like Juan Manuel de Ayala, one of the first to map the San Francisco Bay.
From 1910 to 1940, the U.S. Immigration Station processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the majority from China. During World War II, Japanese, and German POWs were detained at the Station before being sent to facilities farther inland.
The Local Project – (April 14, 2023) – Working within the existing footprint of a round home, Feldman Architecture reimagines a disjointed circular structure into an innovative futuristic house. By connecting the residence to its lush surroundings and opening up spaces, the possibilities of an ocular form are realised.
Video timeline:00:00 – Introduction to the Innovative Futuristic House 00:23 – The Original Home and the Vision 01:07 – A Walkthrough of the Home 01:36 – Blurring the Lines between Inside and Outside 01:58 – The Original Story of the Home 02:21 – Functioning like a Sun Dial 02:42 – Curves All Around 03:00 – Creating the Curves with a Compass 03:31 – The Materials and the Shape 04:29 – A Unique Experience for the Client and the Architects
Nestled within the picturesque San Francisco hills, Feldman Architecture renovates an introverted round structure into an innovative futuristic house that thrives in its distinctive shape, location and views. Integral to the building’s remodelling is reworking the internal spaces to make them more functional and connected to the outdoors. The edge of the house wings out towards views of the landscape and it is also anchored to the land on the west side.
To make the most of its unique position, the garage was expanded to act as a base for the house and the stairwell was moved so that it takes you directly to the upper level. Upon entering, you see a framed view of the kitchen and then immediately turn into the open plan living. Here, there is a living and dining with tall ceilings, which open out to cascading views. Suddenly, there is a blurring of the indoors and outdoors, typical of Californian architecture. The rooms within the home follow an organic theme reminiscent of the structure’s circular shape.
The rigid flow of the old house has been transformed – the innovative futuristic house welcomes a nice sense of symmetry in the redesign of the kitchen and skylight as an oculus hub in the centre of the home. This skylight functions like a sundial and moves about at different points in time, reflecting a constant interplay with light. A thoughtful selection of materials are chosen to soften the powerful geometry of the home. In terms of finishes and materiality, the residence is very minimalist.
Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, straddling the border of California and Nevada. It’s known for its beaches and ski resorts.
Video timeline: South Lake Tahoe(4:45), Emerald Bay(16:25), Meeks Bay(18:15), Homewood(19:10), Tahoe City(19:43), Truckee(20:29), Tahoe Vista(21:48), Kings Beach(22:12), Crystal Bay, NV(23:22), Incline Village(24:01), Sand Harbor(26:23)
On the southwest shore, Emerald Bay State Park contains the 1929 Nordic-style mansion Vikingsholm. Along the lake’s northeast side, Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park includes Sand Harbor Beach and Spooner Lake, a gateway to the long-distance Tahoe Rim Trail.
Redwood National and State Parks are a string of protected forests, beaches and grasslands along Northern California’s coast. Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park has trails through dense old-growth woods. Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is home to Fern Canyon, with its high, plant-covered walls. Roosevelt elk frequent nearby Elk Prairie. Giant redwood clusters include Redwood National Park’s Lady Bird Johnson Grove.
An #OurGreenPlanet co-production with The Listening Planet, in association with The Moondance Foundation.
Ever see a rainbow at night? Moonbows (aka lunar rainbows) are a rare and mesmerizing phenomenon caused by light from a full moon shining on rain or the spray of a large waterfall. This first-of-its-kind video captures the famous moonbows of Yosemite National Park in a way that has never been seen before – by filming at real-time speed!
Until recently, the only way to film by moonlight was to use timelapse to gain more light through longer exposures. While timelapse is a useful filming technique, the fast motion doesn’t illustrate the immense scale of Yosemite’s waterfalls. I wanted to capture a true-to-life moonbow experience using a cinematic 24 frames-per-second frame rate. To meet this goal, I started experimenting with a new camera, fast lenses, and advanced noise-reduction software during the 2016 moonbow season. Every April, May, and June since then I would collect more footage and refine my low-light shooting skills while enjoying the incredible beauty of Yosemite in spring. In all, the footage in this video was filmed during 11 separate visits to Yosemite.
Filming at 24 frames-per-second allowed me to capture brief details that would easily be missed by timelapse. The shooting star (see if you can spot it!) was my favorite fleeting moment. I also enjoyed being able to film the fine textures of the falling water, the hypnotic ebb and flow of the wind-borne mist, and the excited reactions from people enjoying Yosemite at night. Filming at normal speed also accommodated live audio recording of Yosemite’s nocturnal soundscape.
In addition to the technical challenges of filming moonbows, I also needed to know when and where to see them. As with rainbows, moonbows require a precise alignment of the light source (the full moon, in this case), an area of rain or mist in the air, and the person observing. Using 3D-modeling software, I developed a method to visualize when moonbows could be seen for a given location. These calculations have helped me discover new compositions for photographing this striking phenomenon, and in 2018 I created the website YosemiteMoonbow.com so that I could share this information with others who want to see the moonbow from popular vantage points in the park.
Moonbows are just as common in nature as rainbows, but they often go unnoticed because human vision isn’t as sensitive to color in low light. When you first arrive at the base of the falls, you might see the bow as a gray arc in the mist, but as your eyes get acclimated to the dark, the moonbow will grow more vivid, especially when wind intensifies the spray. Compared to humans, cameras are much better at perceiving color in the dark, easily revealing the hidden beauty of moonlit nights.
Capturing the Yosemite moonbow with video hasn’t been easy. These dark scenes are a stretch for even the best low-light cameras, to say nothing of the challenges of trying to do quality photography while being sprayed with water in the cold dark of night. But that’s all part of the moonbow experience. There’s something a little wild about heading out into the forest at night to stand in the spray of a raging waterfall, but it’s always a good time!
The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, known locally as the Bay Bridge, is a complex of bridges spanning San Francisco Bay in California. As part of Interstate 80 and the direct road between San Francisco and Oakland, it carries about 260,000 vehicles a day on its two decks.
Starting with an early picture of a gang of badass gold prospectors who put this beautiful Northern California city on the map, this ambitious and immersive photographic history of San Francisco takes a winding tour through the city from the mid–nineteenth century to the present day.
The Streets of San Francisco
An epic pictorial history of the City by the Bay
Enjoy eye-catching views of the city’s most enduring landmarks and symbols: the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the picturesque trams that wind up and down the famously steep hills, the popular waterfront, its beautiful bay, and its spectacular cityscapes and vistas. San Francisco’s counterculture movements that shaped our collective consciousness are also featured prominently: the beats of North Beach, the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the gay communities of Castro, and the Black Panthers of neighboring Oakland. Some of the city’s most famous residents also make appearances: Robin Williams, The Grateful Dead, Angela Davis, Janis Joplin, Sylvester, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.
This book features hundreds of newly found images from dozens of archives including museums, universities, libraries, galleries, private collections, and historical societies, from 19th-century daguerreotypes to mid-century Kodachromes to 21st-century digital pictures. Master photographers include, among others: Stephen Shore, Imogen Cunningham, Fred Lyon, Steve Schapiro, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, Albert Watson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, William Claxton, Fred Herzog, Ansel Adams, Jim Marshall, and many local shooters. Also includes introductory essays and captions by Bay Area–based author Richie Unterberger and a “Best of San Francisco” books, music, and movies section and biographies of the photographers. Tony Bennett famously sang, “I left my heart in San Francisco,” and this meticulously researched and conceived portrait will equally inspire and make you fall in love with the spirit of the City by the Bay.
On a dead still November morning in the Sierra Nevada, two researchers walk through a graveyard of giants. Below their feet: a layer of ash and coal. Above their heads: a charnel house of endangered trees.
This is Alder Creek Grove, a once idyllic environment for a majestic and massive specimen: the giant sequoia. It is now a blackened monument to a massive wildfire—and humankind’s far-reaching impact on the environment. But these two researchers have come to do more than pay their respects.
Linnea Hardlund and Alexis Bernal, both of the University of California, Berkeley, are studying the effects of record-breaking fires such as the one that destroyed large swaths of Alder Creek Grove in the hopes that their findings will inform forest management that might preserve giant sequoias for future generations.
So far, those findings are grim: mortality in Alder Creek Grove is near 100 percent. Of the mighty trees that stood watch for thousands of years, only charred skeletons remain. About a century of aggressive fire suppression and a warming, drier climate have created a perfect environment for unprecedented fire.
On August 19, 2020, it came to the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The SQF Complex was two fires—the Castle and Shotgun fires—that burned for more than four months, affecting nearly 175,000 acres. And a preliminary report on the Castle Fire estimated that 10 to 14 percent of all living giant sequoias were destroyed.
Hardlund, who is also at the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, and Bernal fear that, without scientifically informed intervention, such fires will continue to return to the Sierra Nevada—leaving the once proud guardians of the forest a memory and another casualty of our ecological failure.
The Ansel Adams Wilderness is a wilderness area in the Sierra Nevada of California, United States. The wilderness spans 231,533 acres; 33.9% of the territory lies in the Inyo National Forest, 65.8% is in the Sierra National Forest, and the remaining 0.3% covers nearly all of Devils Postpile National Monument.
“Sunday Morning” takes us to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest – trees that date back thousands of years – at Inyo National Forest in California’s White Mountains. Videographer: Lee McEachern.
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