It’s hard to beat Rodeo Beach in Marin – such a beautiful spot with lots going on.
Here’s a shot taken with my tiny Canon PowerShot S100 on an afternoon walk along Marin’s Rodeo Beach with Doug Kaye.
Great fun!
Category: Photography – Canon PowerShot S100
A post today from Michael Frye brought back memories of an amazing workshop led by Michael last year in the Eastern Sierras.
This is one of the images from that weekend – shot with a point and shot – my Canon PowerShot S100.
Sometimes, it’s not about the big gear – it’s seeing and shooting – with what’s at hand.
After I posted my Delta image yesterday, my friend Richard Valenti suggested an alternative treatment – rotating it 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
I think he was right – this makes for a more interesting image! I added a bit more vignetting and a bit of sharpening. Nice!
Thanks to Charles O. Perry for Eclipse – a beautiful sculpture.
This image is from a photo walk last September at Embarcadero Center.
You may recognize this as part of the fountain inside the Hyatt Embarcadero Center – shot with my tiny Canon PowerShot S100 and post processed in Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5.
I love the angles and tonality of this image – and the sparkling lights coming down in the background.
Thanks to Charles O. Perry for Eclipse – a beautiful sculpture.
Tonight I was looking back at some of my images from last year – and I came across this one from March 2012.
Doug Kaye and I had agreed to meet up at the Powell Street BART station – thinking that, because of the weather, we’d spend most of our time underground in the BART system. As it turned out, there was a patch of blue outside the station and some sunlight was streaming in. So, we went up rather than down – and headed from Powell Street Station toward Yerba Buena Center.
Along the way, we had some beautiful light and I was opportunistic. On most of our photo walks, I carry a big DSLR (Canon 5D Mark II or, more recently, Nikon D600) and a Canon PowerShot S100 point and shoot in a case on my belt. I’ve also got an iPhone in my pocket – so, actually, I’m walking around with three cameras!
As we headed into Yerba Buena Center, I noticed this fellow enjoying the morning sun on this concrete bench and captured the moment with the Canon PowerShot S100. I processed this image in Photoshop using a modified technique I’ve been learning from Chris Hilgert – using a low contrast black and white layer onto which we add an overlay layer, a color layer, and refine them together.
I enjoy the beautiful light and color in this image – along with the beautiful relaxation he’s enjoying in the morning light!
On my recent people-to-people cultural exchange visit to Cuba, I shot almost 1,500 images during six days of out and about walking – almost all of it in Old and Central Havana.
In packing for this trip, I wanted to stay light – but I also didn’t want to miss any photo opportunities due to not having the “best” gear. I had three cameras with me: a Nikon D600 (over my shoulder), a Canon PowerShot S100 (in a case on my belt), and my iPhone 5 (in a pants pocket). Most of my images were taken with the Nikon, a few with the S100 – and a number of “location establishing” shots with my iPhone – taking advantage of it’s ability to capture GPS location data. For the Nikon, I had packed three lenses – the “kit” lens that came with the D600 – a 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom, an 85mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a light 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom.
I decided not to take a tripod – I’m a pretty fickle tripod shooter anyway and figured opportunities for using a tripod in the heart of Havana might be limited.
On the first day, I carried two lenses along – one on the camera with the second in a pocket in my vest. I had brought along a small daypack but decided not to use it. Wish I hadn’t brought it – it stayed in my hotel room the whole time!
Each day, we were accompanied by a Cuban photographer – and I soon noticed how little gear they typically carried. The Cubans weren’t changing lenses – they were just shooting away with the lens on their camera. Nor were they carrying tripods.
After carrying two lenses and finding that I also rarely changed lenses, I mostly just went out with one lens on the Nikon – typically the 24-85mm zoom. That lens turned out to be near perfect for the street photography we were doing. The one time I made use of the 85mm prime lens was for shooting the show at the Tropicana. It was the ideal lens for that – having just enough reach and low light performance for that venue. I rarely used the 70-300mm zoom – should have also left it at home as it turned out but it’s a light enough lens to almost not matter.
For capturing street shots, I mostly left the Nikon in P mode – with auto ISO and auto focus enabled. The D600 does a great job at figuring things out – and I was mostly very happy with the images I got. A few times, focus was off – and I flipped it into a different focus mode to adjust. I also used aperture priority for a few shots where I really wanted more control over depth of field. But mostly I let the camera do its thing – and came away very happy with the results.
While the gear obviously matters, it turned out not worrying much about it was the best choice for me. Being in the moment, seeing such great opportunities in a venue like Havana, made capturing images such a delight!
I brought along an 11-inch MacBook Air – to use for offloading images from the SD cards each evening – as well as an external hard disk to backup the images from the Air – ending up with two copies of each original image. After offloading the SD cards, I would put them back in the camera and reformat them in the camera before going out each morning.
I enjoyed sitting in bed at night or early in the morning processing a few of my images on the Air using Lightroom and Photoshop CS6. We needed to select five of our favorite images for a group show the night before leaving Cuba – and that was easy given having the Air and Lightroom along.
One our way early last week to Havana, Doug Kaye and I got into Miami a day early and had a delightful late evening stroll up Ocean Drive in South Beach – cameras in hand. Doug brought his “big” Nikon D600. I brought my tiny Canon PowerShot S100. We had a lot of fun – the neon lights were great, the people were, as they say, very interesting, and the weather was balmy and delightful.
This image is of the public restrooms at 14th Street and Ocean Drive. Almost looks like it came out of an Edward Hopper painting from the 1930’s!
More of my South Beach at night photos are in this set on Flickr.
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!
Floats, fishing nets and chains – from inside one of the buildings at China Camp Village. I loved the light, the pile and texture of the nets and the random nature of the chain and float. Definitely one of those “in the moment” shots!
Shot with my Canon PowerShot S100, edited in Lightroom 4.3 using Trey Ratcliff’s Lightroom Presets (Marketstreet).
Earlier today, Adobe’s Julieanne Kost shared some images of succulents she made using the Oil Paint filter in Photoshop CS6. They were great – and brought me back to images of a succulent wall that I had taken using my tiny Canon PowerShot S90 at the Sunset Magazine Celebration Weekend in June 2010. This was a display by Succulent Gardens of Castroville, CA.
I pulled this image into Photoshop and tweaked the Oil Paint filter in initially add the artistic strokes. After that, I followed with a modified Picture Postcard workflow to add more depth followed by a trip in Lab color to bring out some of the colors. Fun!
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