Oakland in stills
Hard watch. Early 2000s energy. A surprisingly bland city. This is San Francisco? What happened? On the surface, it had the scale, the buildings, the concrete, but where were the people? Fresh Midwest eyes saw a devolved experiment. Overbuilt scraps of dormant monuments…
The market is packed again. A lot of people. A lot of separate moments wrapped up into one frame. Every corner from 9th to 8th to Washington had activity, an organized yet scattered crowd beneath the canopy line. Above, the Chinatown Farmers Market is cycling through dramatic…
The rhythm of life has many beats, many musicians, all who play the beat a little differently. The constant to sync up? Change. 🌎 Welcome to Oaklens .art version 4.0 I've never been more excited for the site and its future. Bear with me over the next week or so, still a little…
Effortless. An enraptured bubble of bliss. It was an unusual pocket of talent for the streets of San Francisco. This couple was moving through the square with a radiating joy that had absolutely nothing to do with an audience. I just happened to be in the right orbit to catch a…
Finally! 30+ new wallpapers spanning my cold archives to fresh shots from the SD card as recently as yesterday. The Grid: Expanded coverage of Oakland and SF transit layers, focusing on deep sub-terminal architecture and high-contrast concrete. The Noise: Introduced…
No commentary. No story, no caption, no context. The frames are the entry. Examine them. Sit with them. Move on when you're ready .
"A picture is worth a thousand words." By that logic, two photos equal two thousand, three equal three thousand, and so on. On the street, running a heavy burst mode leaves the shutter with a massive word count. Within the milliseconds of holding down the shutter button, a…
It’s the tight spaces that make me feel. The small, the familiar, almost womb like embrace of being tightly wrapped in a cozy hug. As I descended from the top of Broadway I weaved my way through the dwindling crowds of a festival I hadn’t come for, didn’t know was happening, and…
Rule number 1. Most modern cars kill the frame. DOA. Any welded piece of metal on wheels from the 90s to the time of this writing stays out of my frame or ends up on the cutting room floor. The metallic silver Cadillac in the left corner? It bothers me that it doesn't bother me.…
Early 2000s. $2,500 and another $1,500 fix later, I was driving my then 1997 Nissan Altima (the green machine) for the first time, barreling down I-880. Another first, driving in California. That was then. This morning, we screeched out of the subterranean commute, emerging into…
If you've only seen the Archive (the curated side of OAKLENS), the Rolling Buffer is its messy, unbothered opposite. The Archive is the final print. Titled, described, considered. The buffer is the raw feed. Every frame off the SD card, grouped by the day it was uploaded,…
I'm sitting inside the beautiful yet liminal Saluhall next to IKEA, nursing a Smish Smash burger. First try: it's top tier. In a city that leans hard into gourmet fusion, sometimes you just need a straight up, no-nonsense smash. I dropped five stars on 'em before I left. It…