Friend Scott, whom I’d describe as a very serious amateur photographer (and noting that amateur, in French, means ‘lover’) spent the weekend at a photo workshop in San Francisco. Scott sent me a link to his weekend portfolio, many of which pictures I much enjoyed.

I particularly liked the composition above, with its sinuous curves and fern leaves echoing the tile patterns, a symmetry that was made more obvious by rendering the photo in black and white. The crop is good, too.

I wanted to send Scott a link to a photo of a curved stairway I’d made in Chicago, only to discover that the most recent iPhoto upgrade seems to have deleted 50 of the photos I’d taken on that particular trip. This is not the first time an iPhoto ‘upgrade’ has randomly deleted photos, apparently irretrievably, including the staircase (sadly, only one web-res picture remains from that outing, and it’s not the staircase).

So, off I went in search of Ferenc Berko’s fabulous study of a curved Chicago stairway, shot in the 1940s, only to discover that it is nowhere to be found online. My goal was to show Scott, by way of encouragement, that at least two other photographers had been enchanted by the same vision…

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