During a brief layover in Paris recently I hit the streets with my iPhone and a Sony RX100M6 to see what I might see. Here are a few from a couple of hours on the street.
Category: iPhone Xs Max
Recently, I participated in Valérie Jardin’s Normandy workshop and had the special opportunity to visit the artists working at the pottery in Bavent, a few miles from our home base in Cabourg.
The artists we very welcoming and open to our visit – it was a special time to be able to see them work and to capture a few portraits of them. Special thanks to each of the artists for being so generous with our group of photographers and to Valérie for enabling us to visit.
For making these images I used my iPhone. Here are a few of my favorites images from the visit.
Last Friday my friend Doug Kaye and I were out on one of our regular San Francisco photowalks – this time walking from the Ferry Building towards Pier 39. We had fun along the way outside the Exploratorium – watching these dogs strictly obey their dog walker – and some other street scenes.
As we walked beyond the Exploratorium we came across this BIG yacht – the Aviva – docked at Pier 17 along the Embarcadero. According to Wikipedia, it’s 223 feet long (!) and owned by Bahama-based British businessman Joe Lewis.
It was interesting to find the yacht here – during the period that the Bahama’s were suffering under the onslaught of Hurricane Dorian last week. But perhaps it being here had something to do with the opening of Chase Center?
Here’s another, more artistic/painterly treatment of the Aviva:
Last Friday my friends Doug Kaye, Steve Disenhof and I spent some time at the recently re-opened Salesforce Park in San Francisco. This park is above the Transit Center on the roof – elevators at either end bring you up to this roof top level.
One of the fun things to see at the park is a fountain (you can just see the holes for the nozzles in the white ring above) that’s triggered when a bus comes through the Transit Center below. There’s a glass wall behind the fountain that makes for some fun reflections. That’s a reflection of Steve walking in the upper right corner (with the hat!).
With this image, I tweaked it a bit in Lightroom, Photoshop and Topaz Simplify to give it a more painterly effect in black and white. The original image – shot with my iPhone Xs Max – is below:
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Roses
From a morning walk at a local nursery. Shot with my iPhone Xs Max, tweaked in iColorama To add a painterly effect and Photos to add drama.
My photographer friend Roxanne Overton has pioneered using an easy technique in Photoshop for creatively merging multiple images of the same subject. Doug Kaye wrote about the technique – and how to do it – on his blog a while back.
While multiple images taken from slightly different positions often generates the most interesting results, you can sometimes be surprised by the simplest approach.
Here, for example, is an image taken with my iPhone along the San Francisco Embarcadero yesterday that I processed using the Overton Technique. It was generated from one image. After opening the image in Photoshop, I duplicated the layer and then horizontally flipped it – creating a mirror image. Auto-blend then combined the two layers to generate this results – which I tweaked a bit further back in Lightroom to black and white, etc.
If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud member and have both Lightroom and Photoshop, give this technique a try. After playing with a few image sequences, you might find one that feels downright brilliantly creative!
We are having a lovely early June weekend here in the San Francisco Bay Area and it was one of those perfect lazy Sundays to visit the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.
I recently broke the femur in one of my legs and am just now getting to the point of being able to get around using just a cane and without the seemingly ever present walker that I’ve been using. Cantor is a perfect spot for taking it slow while getting in some good exercise walking both indoors and out. It’s a perfect place for some iPhone photography along the way!
The inner courtyard has a new piece that’s very striking in its isolation:
A lunch of shiitake mushroom soup at the Cool Cafe hit the spot with just enough sustenance to keep me going. Next to me on the patio we’re a couple reading – they looked like regulars who enjoyed the ambiance of reading under an umbrella while overlooking the lovely lawn view adjacent! Put me in the mood to do the same! (I’m currently reading Bitcoin Billionaires!)
In one of the indoor galleries are paintings from two favorite artists: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe. Here’s the O’Keefe work:
And the Hopper piece:
Out in the Rodin Sculpture Garden it was lovely parking myself in the shade, reading a bit and watching the visitors explore. Along the way I noticed the sunlight on one of my favorite small sculptures in the big Gates of Hell:
Here are a few more images from my walk at Cantor today – and a few more over by the main Quad and Memorial Church:
It’s early spring here in Menlo Park and the drive west into Woodside and Portola Valley along Sand Hill Road is one of my favorites. Along the way there are several wonderful old trees – including this one, perhaps my favorite! Shot with my iPhone Xs Max.
One of my favorite local destinations is the Portola Valley Library. Near the parking area is a beautiful field of trees leading up to the hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
As I arrived yesterday afternoon, this tree was glowing in the afternoon sun – at a low angle in the sky on this day in early December. Image shot with iPhone Xs Max and tweaked in Snapseed.
Whenever I meet up with my photo buddy Doug Kaye for a few hours of San Francisco street photography, we almost always meet at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. I find it convenient to drive to BART and then take it to the Embarcadero station which is just across from the Ferry Building – a quick 5 minute walk and I’m there.
This time of year, the sun angle (both low in the sky and the direction it is casting shadows) make for interesting photos outside the Ferry Building. Here are three examples – two were taken out the window on the Bay side of the building adjacent to Peet’s Coffee. The third was taken outside in front of the Ferry Building shooting directly into the sun.
There are a couple of other great photography locations here – especially the indoor marketplace area with its superb indirect overhead light – I’ll share a few examples of images taken there in a future post.
All three of these images were taken with an iPhone Xs Max and it’s superb camera! All of these images were also shared previously on my Instagram account.
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