Clock Photos, by Bill Heller

Thursday, November 29, 2012
Clocktower Compass View

Another angle on the view from the Courthouse Cocktower

Monday, November 19, 2012
La Arcada Christmas Panorama

Walking on State Street at Christmas time.

Sunday, November 11, 2012
Clocktower View Center stereographic corner vertical 02

A view from the center of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Clocktower.

Friday, November 2, 2012
Santa Barbara Courthouse Clocktower

One of the best places in Santa Barbara to sepnd the day is the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. One of the most amazing architectural experiences around, and it costs absolutely nothing to enjoy the beauty and the view from the top. (Unless of course you have a photo shoot there and you have to pay for a permit, but this day was purely for the enjoyment.)

Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Courthouse Clockwork Closeup

This is a close-up of the gears at the top of the clockwork inside the Courthouse Clocktower. I find the gear box on the top as well as the cool looking universal joints on the four sides that allow the shafts to have a slight angle in them. I'm sure glad they were inspired to display the clockworks when they refurbished the clock.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012
State Street Trolly

This shot was on a morning walk down state street, looking for good prospects for a cover for a local business publication. I kind of like the trollys.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012
La Arcada Palms

Just off State Street, at La Arcada Plaza. This is one of those beautiful little spots that you might go right past if you're not paying attention. La Arcada is a nice shpping center on a little walking path back from state street that has some cute little shops and great restaurants. Definitely a great place to spend the afternoon on a beautiful Santa Barbara day.

Friday, October 5, 2012
Courthouse Clockwork

Thanks to some dedicated volunteers, the Courthouse clocktower has a new attraction. As if the view from the top wasn't enough. Refurbishing the mechinsim of the clock was something that was overdue. But the dedicated caretakers of this local gem went above and beyond. Rather than just fix the clock and close it back up, they realized the intricate workings of this amazing device was something most visitors would love to see. With the backdrop of an amazing mural the wokrings of the clock are as beautiful and interesting as the exterior architecture that encloses it. I particularly like the gear at the top that distributes the movement of the clock to the four faces on the sides of the tower.

Thursday, October 4, 2012
Towering over Santa Barbara

A little bit different angle on the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Clocktower.

Sunday, April 29, 2012
Courthouse Clocktower Morning Colors

A beautiful view of an absolutely amazing example of local architecture, the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.

Thursday, March 29, 2012
Courthouse Clocktower Morning Colors

A beautiful view of an absolutely amazing example of local architecture, the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.

This is an older shot from a permit shoot of the Courthouse. There seems to be a lot of demand for Courthouse images lately, (not hard to see why,) so I have been trying to find some interesting unpublished images to add some variety.

Thursday, March 8, 2012
Santa Barbara County Courthouse Anacapa Archway

One of the most famous views in Santa Barbara, the County Courthouse from the Anacapa side offers veiws of the beautiful archway and clock tower. The tower is the location of many weddings and is just an amazing place to see a panoramic view of the city.

Thursday, January 12, 2012
Looking West from the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Clocktower

A beautiful view on a wonderful day. Looking out over Santa Barbara from the County Courthouse Clocktower.

Monday, October 26, 2009
Sunset Clouds Over The Clock Tower

This is a little bit different angle on the Courthouse from the sunken gardens. Of course the main star of the show was the amazing sunset clouds. They were moving very quickly and the light was changing fast. In only a few minutes they were gone. But I'm very happy with the results!

Sunday, March 15, 2009
Misty Morning Courthouse

This is another image from my recent Courthouse shoot. When I posted my previous courthouse shot I thought that was the one the client chose. But they are leaning toward this one now. A massive panorama taken in the first glow of the morning. The fog was so thick when I was driving there I thought I would not be able to get the shot. But it actually made for some interesting lighting. The light on the left cast shadows up from the building through the fog.

A few projects have been taking a lot of my time lately. To top it off, my main backup drive crashed. With just under a Terabyte of images on there I'm feeling pretty lucky at this point to have everything safe with the exception of one large image that I was working on at the time of the crash.

I did find an interesting thing though. When your backup drive crashes it is very nerve racking until you find a way to get everything backed up again. Of course, the only way to backup a terabyte of data fast is to put it anywhere and everywhere there is space.

I started posting this image on the fifteenth, but it's taken me a week since the full size image is 2.6 gigabytes. But I finally got things moved off onto new hard drives so I actually have some scratch disk space. TWO terabyte backup drives so everything is double backed up. With every drive crash I get more paranoid. But it's a healthy paranoia that keeps my favorite images safe.

Sunday, February 22, 2009
Courthouse Evening

This is another image from my recent Courthouse shoot. In fact, it's looking like this will be THE shot that the client likes. They were only looking for one cover shot, but since I was going through all the paperwork to get the permit I made it a day long event. Good thing too, this is not really what the client was asking for in the beginning, but they decided they liked this one even better than the requested image.

These were some of the first shots with my new camera, and so far I am very happy with the results. It's not like me to buy camera equipment anywhere but eBay, but once in a while it's nice to have a shiny new toy... oh I mean shiny new piece of business equipment. Besides, my 20D took it's 40,000th shot just before this project. So it's time it had some reinforcements just in case that shutter decides to give out in the middle of an important shoot.

Thursday, February 5, 2009
Quatrefoil and Clocktower

The Courthouse is one of the most photographed buildings in Santa Barbara. Still, the building itself sits on two sides of a city block. If you take a closer look the details could keep you busy for weeks with a camera. I can't imagine the effort that went into creating them.

The small window beneath the clocktower on the Garden side is one of those details that you might easily miss. If you look around you can find these Quatrefoil or "four leafed" windows all throughout the architecture of our city but I think this is the most ornate and beautiful example you'll find.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Two Thirty

I love sun dials. Hopefully someday soon we'll have space for a nice one. Of course I'll probably just fill the space up with more plants. But that's ok too. :-D

Sunday, June 19, 2005
Courthouse Clocktower Sunset

This was taken right after yesterday's photo of the day. When I was at the beach art walk today someone asked me what time of day I took that picture. So I said I could tell them exactly what time, and I flipped to this photo. Of course I now realize that someone at the Courthouse needs to adjust at least one of these clocks.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Courthouse Archway

In keeping with my recent architectural theme! I'm really enjoying those night shots!

Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Courthouse Clock Tower

Ahh computers!

A necessary evil of modern life.

A little over a week ago the drive on my server failed, which started an absolutely unimaginable week of hardware problems. Not the least of which was the new drive in the server failed right after the OS was installed. When the week was over I had lost more hardware (and data) to random failures than I have ever before in my whole life.

Now for the good news. The last two Saturdays I have started a new art show at the La Cumbre Plaza and it has been fantastic. Lots of people, and many of them interested in my work. The first Saturday I did not get a chance to sit down the whole day.

And, another exciting result of the recent shows... my art will soon grace the walls of a newly remodeled local Mexican Restaurant! That brings me to toady's image. Since most of my work at the shows is floral and Hummingbirds, I am collecting some local architecture images for this project. If you would like to see the collection, just watch the previous week I will fill in the missing days. I really think someone is trying to tell me something! Computers... BAD! Photography... GOOD! It's times like this I'm glad I don't use a digital camera!

Saturday, January 22, 2005
DCXVIIII

There is a great little area at State Street and Figueroa in Santa Barbara called La Arcada. It is a little walkway lined with shops and restaurants and a number of Galleries. One of which, incidentally, has a display of my photography right now.

After the rain subsided a bit last week I spent some time at La Arcada trying to get some shots of the Christmas decorations before they take them down.

When I was getting this image ready for the site, I noticed the roman numerals on the face of the clock, particularly the four. The interesting thing is that it is made up of four roman numeral ones IIII, rather than IV. This stood out to me because I remember learning roman numerals from my Mom and Dad. They had a rug inside of our front door when I was a kid that had a clock face on it with the number four made up of four 'I's. I vividly remember my dad pointing it out to me and saying that it was not the proper way to write four in roman numerals. Unfortunately, at the time, we did not have access to something quite as cool as the Internet to learn why some clocks were made that way.

Ahh, but even the Internet doesn't have all the answers. It has some good theories though. The best explanations I could find are listed here. If you have a better theory, I'd love to hear it...

A popular notion is that the visual balance of the clocks were thrown off by the fact that the VIII on the left was so much larger than the IV on the right. So it was a visual decision to use the IIII. Sounds reasonable but there are good references to extremely old clocks that were not symmetrical in other ways but still used this style of markings.
One theory was attributed to a number of different monarchs. It goes something along the lines of a clock maker made a clock for (pick your favorite monarch). When presenting the clock the monarch stated that the numeral IV should actually be IIII. And, who wants to argue with the guy who has all the guillotines. Unfortunately, this one sounds more like a legend started by someone who did not know the real answer. Further discrediting this theory is the fact that the earlier clocks and sun dials are even less likely to have the numeral IV.
Monarch theory and quite a few others.
A much more plausible reason stated hinges on the fact that in the Roman language, Jupiter (as in "king of the gods" Jupiter) was spelled IVPITER since there was no J or U. Not sure the deity of deities would take kindly to having his name abbreviated on the face of all of their clocks, the clock makers erred on the side of not offending him.
Another interesting thought is the fact that using IIII made it easier for metal smiths to cast the numbers because you then had a balanced number of 'I's 'V's and 'X's (twenty, four and four respectively). So you could cast four identical sets of XVIIIII and have one set of numerals for a clock face.
Clock numeral casting theory.
In the end though, it seems that the contractions for fours and nines may not have been used in a consistent way at all. It may have just been common practice for the Romans to use IIII in place of IV. IV could have been a Latin practice much later. The oldest known surviving clock-face along with documents from the same age seem to use IIII regularly. As do the numbers on the surviving doors of the Roman Colosseum.
Other good examples of IIII
And, still more.

Again, if you have any interesting thoughts I would love to hear from you.

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	NOTE: No automated emails are sent from this system and all submissions are securely reviewed offline prior to posting on the site. ^† Your email address is optional. If you do provide it, it will not be displayed on the site and it will never be given out to anyone. -Bill Heller

A Photo a Day by Bill Heller

Clock Photos