Last Friday, Doug Kaye and I met up at one of our favorite photo venues in San Francisco – Embarcadero Center and environs. Turns out it’s easy for Doug to catch the ferry in and it’s similarly easy for me to take I-280 into town and swing around the Embarcadero to park.
On Friday, the famous (infamous?) Vaillancourt Fountain – Québec libre! – in Justin Herman Plaza was empty of water – and Doug had fun walking into what would have been the pool of water at the base of the fountain and taking some photos.
This is image I shot is a much moodier version of the fountain – quickly post-processed in monochrome – which, to me, brings out its essential randomness!
After a couple of hours of photography in the morning, we headed to one of our favorite spots for lunch at the Ferry Building – Slanted Door. Wow, we had an amazing lunch – it doesn’t get much better than that!
On Friday, January 25, 2013, we visited the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de La Habana and watched several graphic artists working on their projects. This printmaker was just getting ready to pull a print as we arrived – and I was able to snap a sequence of shots that culminated in this one of him pulling the print off the press and holding it up for us to see. I decided to post-process it as a monochrome image – to focus the viewer’s eye on him and the print.
Here’s another image – of another print maker adjusting one of his images before pulling another print. The texture of this image is powerful – his look, the tattoos, the hair on his arms and the needle in his hand. It’s one of my favorite images from this particular day in Havana!
Last Sunday I headed up to China Camp State Park in Marin County. I had never been to China Camp before this visit.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, China Camp is a beautiful spot on th western shores of San Francisco Bay. China Camp Village has some very interesting old buildings – and this wonderful, quirky, old pier that juts out into the bay.
I shot a number of different images of this pier – from the left, from the right, and down the middle. I used two big DSLRs – my new Nikon D600, my old faithful Canon 5D Mark II, my iPhone 5, and the camera I used for this particular shot – my tiny Canon PowerShot S100. I continue to be delighted how many great “spur of the moment” shots I capture with this camera (and its earlier versions, the PowerShot S90 and PowerShot S95 – both of which I bought new and subsequently sold as I upgraded along the way).
This was a RAW image shot with the S100, minimally adjusted in Lightroom 4.3 and then brought into Photoshop CS6. I went through my full sequence of steps to enhance the image in the Lab colorspace – before deciding that I thought I’d prefer the final result in monochrome. I used Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the black and white conversion before bringing it back into Lightroom for a couple of final tweaks.
This was a very satisfying image for me. Watching it evolve through the Lab color enhancement process was fun – and then the move into monochrome with Silver Efex was especially exciting. Hope you like it too!
On Sunday, Doug Kaye and I headed out to Point Reyes and a group photo walk at Drake’s Beach. Along the way, Doug stopped briefly at this road – which I call “Radio Road” – heading down to the old RCA / Marconi Radio site. I took this shot with my iPhone 5 looking out the car window – and processed it using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2, Topaz Simplify 4 and Photoshop CS6. It’s a moody, dark lane with this treatment!
For more about radio at Point Reyes, see: Communications at Point Reyes – the home of KPH. The article notes: “The Monterey cypress “tree tunnel” at the Point Reyes station is a signature landscape feature that evokes some of the prestige that RCA placed in this profitable, historic operation.”
This morning I had one of my regular holiday reactions – a sort of cabin fever – and headed out of the house to points unknown for a photography adventure. I packed my cameras in the trunk of the car, grabbed a couple of bottles of water, plugged my iPhone into the car stereo and headed up towards 280.
I thought I’d probably head for San Francisco. For the last few years, I’ve had this thing about shooting the Golden Gate Bridge at this time of year – especially if we’ve got clouds in the sky or a breaking storm moving east. We had both today. But my usual Golden Gate day was January 1st. I was a bit early for that.
As it turned out, as I was heading to 280, I was pulled west – over to the coast. I crossed 280 and headed through Woodside to Hwy 84 and up the hill to Skyline. I continued on down through La Honda, San Gregorio and over to Hwy 1. It was a beautiful drive – cloudy light overhead, a podcast on the radio, and nobody else around.
At Hwy 1, I turned left – heading south along the coast. I made a quick stop at Pomponio State Beach – and chatted a bit with another Nikon shooter about how great it was to just be out above the beach enjoying the late December light. The low sun angle this time of year makes it very special – my favorite time of year for great light. I loved the patterns the waves were making – such as the “S curves” below.
After Pomponio, I continued south on Hwy 1 – passing up the other state beaches along the way as I headed to Santa Cruz. My rough plan was to make a big loop over to Hwy 1, south to Santa Cruz, then up on Hwy 17/85/280 to get back home.
But, of course, there’s Pigeon Point on the way – one of the most beautiful lighthouses on the Pacific coast. I pulled off and had a great time walking along the cliff above the ocean leading south to the lighthouse itself. Here’s a shot taken with my iPhone 5 and post-processed using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
The clouds in the sky and the angle of the light today made for some very special shots – and, on purpose, I was traveling light. No tripod, no serious HDR kind of shooting, just handheld with my Nikon D600 and, when the mood caught me, with my iPhone 5 – such as the shot above. The light and clouds at Pigeon Point were beautiful and I made a number of handheld shots just walking around.
After a great time at Pigeon Point, I headed south – made a detour to try to find the old Bonny Doon Winery tasting room (it’s now in Santa Cruz!) before arriving at Santa Cruz’s Lighthouse Point Park. There’s a surfing museum there in a building that looks like a small lighthouse – but I was captured by the light and skies off the coast.
My loop took over to the coast and back took about four hours. It was great therapy for my cabin fever! Special light, lovely clouds in the skies, beautiful venues – it doesn’t get much better than this. I should be so lucky!
I’ve had an earlier monochrome version of this image as my desktop wallpaper on my 27-inch Apple Cinema Display for many months. It’s a very pleasing image – surprisingly sharp for a non-tripod, handheld image shot at 200 mm with my Canon 5D Mark II.
Tonight I thought I’d process this image again – using some of my newly learned Lab color tricks – but late in the game I veered off back into monochrome, seduced by Photoshop CS6’s new toning options. Blue’s always been a favorite color of mine – and, somehow, this “Night from Day” preset just grabbed me as being right for this image. Time to let it age a bit – this is definitely one image to come back to!
In August of 2010, I took a photography workshop led by Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell to Point Reyes and Tomales Bay. Along the way to the coast, we stopped in the small town of Bodega and had shot the Saint Teresa of Avila Church – in the fog. This image was shot with my tiny Canon PowerShot S90 and I have previously processed it this way:
I loved the foggy moodiness of the image – and the amber colors in the grassy foreground. I reprocessed it in monochrome with a bit of a texture overlay to add a bit more drama for the version up top.
The town of Bodega is famous for having been included in Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. The church itself was photographed in 1953 by Ansel Adams.
Recently, after exploring other parts of town on one of our regular photo walks, Doug Kaye and I ended up at one of our favorite spots, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
This morning, I processed this image – shot with my new Nikon D600 DSLR. I’ve always enjoyed the way the border of the pond moves through this part of the park. This image is a three image HDR blended using Nik’s HDR Efex Pro and then taken through the Lab color technique that Doug and I have been playing with. I used the ALCE plugin to add local contrast and high pass sharpening on the building itself.
After finishing the color version, I used Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 to do a quick monochrome conversion seen here:
Earlier this week, one of my images from early in my DSLR photography era went viral on one of the sharing sites. It’s a photo taken from Twin Peaks in San Francisco as a winter storm was clearing out to the east.
Here’s that shot:
It was taken with a Canon 30D and processed several years ago into this color version.
Over the last few days, I’ve been trying some new techniques for black and white conversion in Photoshop, trying to create more interesting images. Here’s a quick version of this same image converted to black and white with a bit of split toning applied in Lightroom.
Both versions are over the top in terms of drama but are fun to compare and contrast.
