Basim Jaber

I first met Bay Area night photographer Basim Jaber two years ago when he introduced me to a great little abandoned microwave relay station south of San Jose, CA. Basim has a knack for discovering many new night locations in the San Jose area, and the little relay station was easily accessible, fun to shoot, and located on the top of a hill with a clear view of the moon. Sadly, after only a few visits, it was demolished by the owner.

The photograph below was taken near one of the many active communication towers that surround Santa Clara Valley.

(Information Superhighway, by Basim Jaber)

You can see more Basim's photos on his Flickrstream.

Jack Delano: New Bedford, MA

Jack Delano (wikipedia) was part of the Farm Security Administration photography team during the 1940's. This photograph is dated January, 1941 and may have been taken when Delano was associated with the Office of War Information. I don't really understand how the FSA and OWI were related (it's not clear from Wikipedia, so that must mean that nobody knows *). I love black-and-white photographs taken on a foggy night. The only reason that I don't take any myself, is that we never seem to get fog at night around San Jose, CA. In the past ten years that I've been interested in night photography, I only remember one per-midnight evening when we had fog.

I found this photograph on the Shorpy website, which is a collection of great old photographs, most of them from the public domain.

(Foggy Night in New Bedford, MA, by Jack Delano)

* Note: That comment was intended as a joke. Please don't post comments about how something doesn't exist just because it's not in Wikipedia.

Hunters of Greenland

The NYTimes had a very nice photo-essay titled Hunters of Greenland. It included this nice night photograph by Ragnar Axelsson:

The Northern Lights glow above Tinnittaqilaaq village. The Inuit, whose cultural and spiritual beliefs are deeply intertwined with nature, believe the lights are souls waiting to be reborn.

(Photo by Ragnar Axelsson)

Interview on CaliberSF

Last week Julie Michelle posted an interview with me on the San Francisco street photography blog CaliberSF. The main purpose of the interview was to talk about a portrait project that I'm working on where I photograph Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in the US internment camps during WWII. But since most of my photography over the past ten years has been night photography, we also talked about one of my favorite photographs of Sutro Baths in San Francisco, CA.

(Sutro Baths, by Andy Frazer)

Here's a screen shot of the whole interview: