San Francisco, CA

San Francisco is probably my favourite city in the USA. I don’t know why, but I feel really at home here, and for some reason most people there think I’m a local so obviously there’s a connection.

Note

This article is part of our USA Film Retrospective series, featuring images captured mostly on film on budget cameras in the 1990s and early 2000s. The images have been scanned from film negatives (up to 30 years old) and then post processed to artificially increase sharpness. Please forgive us if they do not meet your expectations of photographic quality.

I am not going to summarise San Francisco in this post because this is not intended to be a tour guide, but I have visited this city many times (primarily to visit various technology companies in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley).

I can’t pretend to distill the spirit of the city in a few photographs, so I’ve chosen to represent San Francisco by the Golden Gate Bridge (and I’ve tried to show both the well known west side as well as the more elusive east side), the Presidio, the Golden Gate Park, Twin Peaks and Stanford University.

The Golden Gate Bridge of course needs no introduction and it has become an iconic symbol of the city itself. Most tourists are familiar with the west wide of the bridge. The east side of the bridge is more elusive and best viewed from the water. I’ve captured it from Lincoln Boulevard.

The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army military fort on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is a stop on the 49-Mile Scenic Drive.

Another stop on that drive is the Golden Gate Park. This is long rambling park with various feature gardens, museums and other attractions. The photographs here depict the Park in 1997, and I am sure some things have changed since.

Finally, Stanford University at the heart of Silicon Valley near Palo Alto is of course well known and a powerhouse for educating and enabling the people founded the various technology companies in the Valley as well as the people who work in those companies today.

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Posted by Chris Tham

Chris Tham is a co-founder of Visual Voyager Pty Ltd, the Principal Voigtländer Ambassador for Mainline Photographics and a Workshop Instructor for Mainline Photo Academy. She brings over 35 years of experience as a photographer to her role, starting with a Yashica rangefinder belonging to her dad, joining the Photography Club in school, and developing her own photos. More recently, Chris has been taking photos during her travels, and as a result has experienced some of the most interesting places in the world. Chris focuses on nature, street, and urban architecture subjects in her photography.