You can view larger scans of this panorama here: Left half, Right half.

The Salinas picture has a large railroad yard in the foreground, taking up almost half the picture, perhaps because the railroad connections were a key asset of Salinas in 1906, just as the ocean takes up almost half the picture of Santa Cruz. Quite likely people in Salinas told Lawrence to be sure he featured the railroad yards prominently in the foreground.

The picture was taken facing south, towards Mt. Toro, on the skyline to the left of center. To the right of center you can see where the road to Monterey disappears between the hills, the path of highway 68 today.

The sun is setting, so the building facades facing west are more brightly illuminated than any other features in the picture. Although Lawrence’s most famous picture, the Ruins of San Francisco, was taken directly into the setting sun, normally he preferred to have the sun overhead in his panoramas, for a more uniform exposure.

Lawrence designed his kite aerial photography setup over a period of years, as a complete system, where different factors were adjusted to work together. He usually took pictures from a camera height of 800 to 1000 feet, although the lead kite would be higher, up to 2000 feet above. His film exposure was calibrated to the camera height, and he also used a shield over the lens to give more exposure to the distant background, and less exposure to the foreground.

Judging by the size of the railroad cars in the foreground, this picture was probably taken from a much lower altitude, perhaps 400 feet. For whatever reason, it seems Lawrence took this picture in a hurry, at the end of the day, from a lower altitude than usual, and so the exposure is not up to his usual standard.

However there is something very remarkable in this picture, the Steinbeck house, where John Steinbeck grew up and lived until age seventeen, still there today at the corner of Stone St. and Central Ave.:

This is a very casual view from the back, partly obscured by a tree, not at all like the pictures of the Steinbeck house you see in Salinas today. Because this picture was taken before Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize, when he was just 4 ½ years old, digging in dirt and playing with toys, when this house was simply another house in Salinas, nothing else.

There’s a possible lesson there about fate and destiny and genius, nobody in Salinas in 1906 could have expected that small boy would become better known than the entire town, and certainly not George Lawrence. Any 4 ½ year old child today could become more famous in 2106 than a city, destiny and genius at work.

This picture suggests we have no real control over how history will remember us. Because history isn’t just past history, how we remember those before us, it’s also future history, how we are remembered in turn by those after us. And we may work to leave a certain individual or collective or national legacy, but a 4 ½ year old child today may influence the future view of us more than anything we do.

Just because the Salinas picture has those technical problems with exposure, it may have more to say about us and the past and the future, it may be a more profound picture.