Talking Pictures

When the rain stopped, Shawn Clover was on the pedestrian bridge over the street at the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, waiting for someone interesting to come by. He ended up photographing 14 interesting people, one frame for each. This is the image he chose to post to Flickr.

The night promised pictures: there’d be a clear sky and the peak period of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Heading home on New Year’s Day after dropping off a family friend at the bus station, Peter Baumgarten runs into a blinding snowstorm. “Whiteout conditions,” he says, “almost impossible to see 10 feet in front of me, trying to make out car tracks to follow, but they’re completely covered.” After about 20 minutes of anxious struggle through blinding snow, he’s had enough, and he pulls over near a little park in the small town he and his wife, Christianna, are trying to drive through. With a sigh of relief, he lets the stress dissipate.

The kinds of commercial images Ann Elliott Cutting is likely to be called on to create for her clients are interpretive, fanciful, or elaborate illustrations of ideas and concepts. Or, in some cases, they’re all of those adjectives combined into one image. In other words, “create” is exactly the right word for what she does.