There are the scenes which shocked the world, appearing in papers around the globe.  Within on hours they were being developed at Pillsbury's home in  a makeshift dark room and were being carried by any means possible to people waiting for news.   This is photojournalism.  

His name was Arthur Clarence Pillsbury and the cameras he grabbed as he hit the floor would record most of the pivotal moments as the City of San Francisco was consumed in walls of fire. On that first day Pillsbury shot over 70 snap shots and two panoramas, one from the top of the Merchants Exchange Building covering the wholesale section just at noon, and one from the top of the St. Francis Hotel showing almost the entire city in flames.

It was these photos that went out to newspapers all over the world because the destructive might of the Earthquake and Fire had shattered the other facilities that photographers used to develop their film. At the Pillsbury home in Oakland there was running water. Faced with the problem of continuing supplies, Pillsbury sent buyers out to towns as far as 500 miles away to meet the demand for the images. Over the next weeks prints from a single negative of one of the panoramas taken that first day would bring in from $500.00 to $700.00 a day. The photos would also appear in the new San Francisco Magazine, the lay out of images catching the despair and desolation coming on the heels of the erupting inferno.

The panorama negatives measured 44 inches in length and could be blown up to lengths greater than nine feet, showing incredible detail.

At the end of the first day, Pillsbury left his panorama camera, a large and unwieldy mechanism, in the cloak room of the St. Francis Hotel and that night and it was consumed along with the hotel. The film had gone with him, tucked in the pocket of his jacket. The shots taken with the Graflax camera included a shot of the Palace and Grand Hotels coming down, drenched in flame, caught as it seemed to dissolve before your eyes. He reported in his autobiography that the heat was so intense that while taking the picture it scorched the lens making the balsum run and so spoiling the photo. The bellows soon dropped to pieces, he said.

Included in the hundreds of images made by Pillsbury over the next few weeks were scenes filled with destruction, shock, and courage, showing the City as it continued to burn and the people as they struggled to survive and then began the long, slow, painful process of rebuilding. While taking photos and following the course of the struggle to stop the fire Pillsbury also found time to ensure that friends and acquaintances were safe. Some he sent on to his home in Oakland, where many camped out for weeks afterwards. Among these was the woman he would marry. Dragging the single trunk they had been able to save from her home in San Francisco to the ferry proved to be a one way trip for the lady. The two were married six weeks later in a small ceremony attended by both families from several parts of California.

The previous month, March, 1906, Pillsbury had left his three year employment as the head of the photographic department at the San Francisco Examiner. He had been offered the job by Mr. Williams. He had no formal training as a photojournalist but he had lots of experience. His employment at the Examiner followed his invention of the circuit panorama camera and his chronicling of the opening of the mining towns in the Yukon. He had accomplished this by installing a mobile dark room in his canoe and taking it from the headwaters of the Yukon River nearly 3,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean. He sold the photos to miners in the towns, developing them along the next segment of his trip and sending them back to their delighted owners. The price of $5.00 each was paid in gold dust.

That was a credential respected by professionals. His panoramas of the newly discovered Nome, Alaska, were published the world over, even the Ladies Home Journal had put out an edition in featuring the photos rendered in color.

Arthur Pillsbury had returned to San Francisco, a city he loved, from his adventures in the Yukon and before that from Stanford University, where he had studied Mechanical Engineering, quiting in his senior year when his adviser told him his design for the circuit panorama camera he had done as his senior project could not work. Pillsbury went ahead and built it. It worked. He quit school and after a closing out sale at his combination Bicycle and Camera store near the entrance to the campus purchased a a 22 foot gasoline launch and headed out to Alaska. The local paper covering the event reported Pillsbury as an intrepid and experienced navigator. Actually, he had almost no knowledge of boating but had cheerfully purchased navigational charts for the journey.

Arthur's reaction to the comments by his professor marked an end to his formal education but the beginning of a life long romance with the technology of photography. His romance with San Francisco was also intense and punctuated with exciting events and long association as he had studios there in several different locations over the years.