Rockaway Beach

 I like Rockaway Beach.

It's one of ten small communities down south of San Francisco, strung out along CA-1 - the Pacific Coast Highway - that are collectively known as Pacifica. Each is individual, all are small, and very different from the big city to their north.

I discovered Rockaway Beach when I used to fly to San Francisco a lot - usually to Sunnyvale or Milipitas, centers of hi-tech silicon design - and once looked for somewhere to cool down and relax before the long flight home. 'Pacific Coast Highway' sounded promising, and 'Pacifica' sounded nice, and Rockaway Beach had a big sign so I stopped there.

One of the shops at Rockaway beach used to be - and I hope still is - Christmas Cove. It sells Christmas decorations and toys all year round - that is all it sells. I walked into Christmas Cove, in high summer, and the lady greeted someone who must have come in behind me: "Hi! How are ya?? Great to see ya!" and I looked to see who she was greeting but there was nobody - just me. I like that: I know some poeple  - especially English people - find the whole American "have a nice day!" to be presumptuous and over the top and insincere, but I like it, and I liked the Christmas Cove lady's delight at meeting me and I wish now I had once asked her name and invited her to sit with me and have a coffee and shoot the breeze.

Rockaway Beach is popular with surfers, and there is a coffee shop that does sell good coffee and you can buy a coffee and sit on the big rocks by the beach and watch the surfers and feel the sea breeze and there is no better way to spend the hour or two before you drive to the airport and go into that airport limbo and the following zombie flight hours on the redeye home.

Rockaway Beach is also the home of Rockin' Rob's: a classic American diner in true 1950s style. where the burger with Moneterey Jack cheese will sustain you for the next 14 hours and means you can decline the in-flight meal - and where the banana milk shake (pronounced "ban an a" not "ba nah nah") comes with a metal jug refill and may be the best milk shake in the world, ever.

Rockaway Beach may also be the place I took my first ever 'selfie'. I had a little Ericsson mobile phone, and I kept in touch with Sarah, back home, by message and the occasional MMS picture. I was away a lot at that time and it was amazing to be able to share an actual picture of actual me at the actual place where I actually was. I propped up the phone and set a timer and that was it - as far as I know the first selfie I ever took. 

My work in the Bay Area was then with Philips, and the TriMedia chip that was designed for streaming media and TV and all that we now take so much for granted in internet shared media. Some of that work was to do with making pictures look goodn with those new-fangled 'digital camera' thingies. And Rockaway Beach was good for illustrating things about digital photographs. First, the key to a good photo is not the photo itself - it is what the photo evokes in the viewer. Rockaway Beach offers a wide panaorama view - the Pacific Ocean, the surf, the rocks, the hills, the Pacific Coast Highway - but more than that, when you are there you feel the sun in your face, the sea breeze in your hair, you hear the waves crash onto the rocks, the motorbikes roar past, you taste yoru coffee - it is a whole experience that you want to capture. A photo is only ever a small window into that experience - and a good photo sort of 'points to' what is left out of that window. perhaps a path leads away, to somewhere, an dthat path leads the viewer's eye that way, and their mind too, so they gain a sense of something wider, something you want to see, something you are led to guess at, to fill in with your mind. Maybe a wave is rushing in, from left frame, giving the viewer a sense of movement and sound, of something crashing in to their view. Sometimes a figure - a person - is walking into, or out of, the frame - a sense that there is somewhere to come from and to go to as well as what is in the window.

I'm not a good photographer: I know some of what makes a good photo but I am a "snapper", a "selfie-taker", I don't compose I just see and I shoot. But I didn't need to be a good photograher because I wasn't teaching people how to take photos, I was teaching them how to make digital camerass with which photographers woul dtake those photos - and how to compress and stream that photo as data so that the viewer saw it as a good picture. So Rockaway Beach turns up a lot - really a lot - in my work.

First, and simplest, is the way a camera "frames" the view in the "viewfinder" - and how that 'view' relates what what you see with yoru eye, and what you print out, or view on the screen - and Rockaway Beach turns up in my viewfinder images.

I remember making these images - they are all fakes, because I didn't really photograph the photo on my phone and so on - because they are from a time when I was thinking a lot about pictures and what they were for, and I loved that because it meant learning about art as well as technology, and psychology as well as physics, and thinking - literally - 'outside the box' because the view was largey outside the viewfinder.

A TV scriptwriter once told me that the best scripts leave loose ends, because that extends the narrow scope of the depicted world into unknown but hinted-at wider perspectives, and so makes it seem more richer and more real. There is a scene in Love, Actually that I like, where the best man suddenly throws up his arms and stamps and exclaims - and a passerby carrying shopping bags startles, then passes by. I like that scene because the passerby indicates the world in which the best man character exists - a world so much wider than the film itself depicts. A camera viewfinder does that too - it crops the scenee, selects what is important but also hints at what is otherwise left out.

My Rockaway Beach viewfinder images show what is kept and what is left out. The picture was a selfie, with me in it, but most of my selected views leave me out. Looking at them now they evoke memories of me taking that picture - climbing up the zigzag path, pausing to look back, the cool sea air in the heat of summer - but also of selecting, processing, choosing how to use that picture to illustrate the technical as well as creative aspects of digital camera design, and of data compression, transmission, streaming, and rendering. It's not a particularly good picture - the phone camera then had a resolution that would now be considered appalling - but it must be one that I have looked at, thought about, cropped, processed, selected from, more than any other: and that may also have cemented Rockaway Beach in my mind as a special place.

I am glad I no longer travel so much - I did love it when I had to, but it's nice not to any more. But I would like to go back to Rockaway Beach once more.

And I think I can credit Rockaway Beach as starting me off on selfies...