Cameo, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is the dome in the Westfield shopping mall in downtown San Francisco. I believe the dome itself is antique, but it’s placed in an entirely modern shopping mall.

Between committments at Macworld at the Moscone Center I wandered over and indulged my dome photography habit. It’s easy with most domes to capture the entire inside of the structure. The architecture of this one, with the modern shopping mall only a few floors below the mall, made it impossible, even with my fisheye, to capture the full extent of the thing (I may share a fisheye view later). So I got down on the center of the floor under the dome, and used a 12mm wide-angle lens instead to create a jewel-like effect.

Both Macworld and the Westfield shopping mall seemed to me examples of extreme consumption, with tech gadgets the theme at Macworld and shopping-until-you-drop the raison d’être at Westfield. Both the computer show and the shopping mall seemed to be in a bubble of denial (Westfield more so than Macworld).

I tend towards feelings of alienation at times anyhow. But there’s nothing like pulling out the tripod and getting down on the floor in the midst of glitzy stores, carts hawking cosmetics, and glazed shoppers to make one feel like a stranger in a very strange land.