Last Sunday I was out on San Francisco Bay on the Aeolus with Rob Theis and friends. We had a wonderful time sailing and watching the Fleet Week airshow.
Along the way, I captured this shot – and the boat is actually the Serendipity. Marvelous!
Category: Black and White
I’m looking forward to attending next week’s screening of the short film Cuba Cubano Cañibano – about the life and work of Cuban photographer Raúl Cañibano. The event is being held on Wednesday, September 23 in Palo Alto at The Mid Pen Media Center. RSVP if you’re planning to attend as space is limited.
My image above of Raúl shooting was taken in Havana in January 2013.
Last fall, I attended a wonderful street photography workshop in Paris led by Valérie Jardin. On one of our morning walks, there had been a bit of rain overnight which provided a lovely sheen to the streets. By mid-day, it was gone and the day turned sunny and bright. Turned out to be one of the gifts – a morning after the rain with the payment still wet and the skies beginning to clear.
Last night I revisited this image to post-process it again. I’ve recently subscribed to Lynda.com and yesterday watched one of the courses about Photoshop taught by Adobe’s Bryan O’Neil Hughes in which he revisited many old techniques and brought to light new and better ways to do things. As I watched his lessons, I was using this image as my test case. One of the points he stresses is using a non-destructive workflow in Photoshop – something I’ve not been doing but will certainly make much more use of in the future. With this image, I’ve got all of the layers saved in the TIFF file which is now in Lightroom. At some point in the future, I’ll come back to it – and continue a bit more post-processing doing some dodging and burning through luminosity masks.
I’m having fun revisiting Paris as I post-process this particular image. It was a quick “grab shot” at the time I took it – as I had fallen behind our group and was trying to catch up. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky – this was one of those times!
It’s August – and we’re back out on the streets of San Francisco.
Here are a few images from last week’s photo walk with my good friend Doug Kaye. All shot with my Fujifilm X100T – except for that image up top which is an iPhone 6 shot.
The light is shifting – we can sense it and see it – and we’re looking forward to the sun dropping lower in the sky each day into the fall. We love those shadows – in interesting light!
The reflections of light continue to capture our interest. We’ve become “explorers of light” – as we turn each corner, our eyes quickly assess the quality of the light – and we move in where it’s great and move on where it’s not.
Turns out that there’s nothing much better in life than getting out on the streets of San Francisco – with a favorite camera in hand, walking with a good friend, sharing a great meal, and digesting the results!
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
I’ve been having fun going back through some of my images from a year or two ago – including the images I shot in Paris last October.
Here are two examples – of the Paris skyline shot from the Pompidou Center – and processed a bit differently to get to monochrome.
Thanks to Valérie Jardin for her beautiful Paris workshop!
I been doing a bit of experimenting over the last few days with black and white conversion techniques. I particularly find the work of Joel Tjintjelaar of interest – see his Joel Tjintjelaar Flickr Stream and his BWvision web site.
Joel’s latest work is based on a combination of masking techniques – traditional “hard selections” combined with luminosity masking techniques pioneered by Tony Kuyper. I’m intrigued with the notion of applying these techniques to street photography and will be experimenting more to see if we can create even more vibrant black and white street photographs using modifications of Joel’s and Tony’s techniques applied to street photography.
Here are a couple of additional examples from my experiments over the last few days:
This image was most likely shot in 2009 by my good friend – the late Chris Gulker.
We recently came across a roll of unprocessed film in one of Chris’ Leicas from that era – and my friend Doug Kaye had it processed.
Twice a week Lily and I would go for a 1.5 mile walk with Chris around his neighborhood – and then we’d come back to his place, have coffee and solve the world’s problems. Chris made this image during one of our problem solving sessions! Linda Hubbard Gulker put up with us as we did our thing.
We all miss Lily and Chris a lot. Those were very special times!
Shot with my Fujifilm X100T.
Last Friday, in New York’s Central Park, we came across a father and his two sons singing hymns in this underground terrace. Their singing was majestic – and I captured a few images of them singing. This is one of my favorites – Abraham.
I’m just back from a beautiful week of street photography in New York City. Here’s the story about this remarkable week.
My friend Doug Kaye and I happened to learn about photographer Peter Turnley during a visit last fall to the new Leica Store in San Francisco. Their first exhibition was of Peter’s work – and we were truly struck by his wonderful work, all displayed in black and white prints.
After that visit to the Leica Store gallery, we began learning more about Peter and his work – and about his workshops. Sometime late last year we both decided to sign up for Peter’s New York City workshop to be held in June 2015. Doug and I had thought we were pretty much done with workshops – but we both really appreciated Peter’s work so we signed up. We weren’t disappointed – this was a beautiful workshop, one which I would highly recommend.
I’m still thinking about the teachings Peter shared with us during the week – and will post more about that soon. Meanwhile, here are a few of the images that resulted from Peter’s encouragement – all shot with my Fujifilm X100T.
You must be logged in to post a comment.