Early Tuesday morning – ahead of our private payments workshop with our client – Carol and I headed over to the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco to grab coffee.
In the atrium lobby of this great hotel, these lights hang down from above – all you have to do to capture this shot is to LOOK UP! Pretty amazing – and very cool!
Shot with my iPhone 4 – adjusted with Instamatic.
I’ve become a big fan of the old adage – the best camera is the one that’s with you – and mine of late has been my iPhone 4 along with two great apps that just make my iPhone-based photography more fun!
Last Friday I was in San Francisco attending a conference that was held on the 32nd floor of the Westin St. Francis Hotel – with big windows all around. I had fun taking some San Francisco skyline shots – and then using PhotoShop Express‘ Stylize feature to play with them. Here’s an example:
Yesterday, I snapped this photo of Lily which she was sitting on the couch watching the drizzle outside. This was adjusted using TiltShiftGen to add the blur and the vignette around the edges and then uploaded using the Flickr app (TiltShiftGen doesn’t currently support uploading directly to Flickr):
The photography that’s now possible with this combination of the iPhone 4’s great image sensor and these photo apps is just great fun! What are your favorite iPhone photography apps?
From Cafe Borrone at lunch today…
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Earlier this week, I visited both Filoli and the Pulgas Water Temple with my favorite new little camera, the Canon PowerShot S95
At lunch earlier in the week, another friend was telling me his experience using Photomatix Pro to align the multiple exposures associated with an HDR shot. He had taken a skyline view of San Francisco in a sailboat with his Canon 5D Mark II – and was surprised at how well Photomatix did using the “align features” option.
That discussion popped into my head as I was walking around the water temple – so I quickly put the S95 into HDR mode (I have the Custom setting on the Mode dial preconfigured for HDR) and fired off a few shots. Here’s one of the best – looking up inside the Pulgas Water Temple:
You can only visit the Pulgas Water Temple between 9 AM and 4 PM weekdays. It’s not open at all on weekends. Also, note that the water temple site is going to be closed during 2011 due to construction at the site. See this article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the big construction project just getting underway to build the Bay Division Pipeline 5.
According to Wikipedia: “Pulgas” is the Spanish (and Portuguese) word for “fleas”, which were encountered by early Spanish explorers of the area.
I just finished reading Kevin Starr’s new book Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge
Were you aware that the color the bridge is painted is called “international orange“. What a great name for a color! Wikipedia says it’s “a color used to set things apart from their surroundings” – and, indeed, it plays that role with the bridge!
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, on the other hand, is a boring grey color – maybe it’s known as “Local Drab”?
[Note about the photo above: taken January 23, 2010, from the top level of Fort Point in San Francisco just below the Golden Gate Bridge – shot using the Canon PowerShot S90 using traditional HDR techniques. This is unique picture of the bridge is one of my most popular images on Flickr! For more fun, view the large image on a black background!]
Here’s a new Flickr set with some quick shots taken after lunch today with my good friend Doug Kaye out near the Warming Hut in the Presidio of San Francisco.
These are the first pictures taken with my new Canon PowerShot S95
Here’s Doug with his Nikon D90 angling for a great shot:
Well, maybe not exactly “sail”…
Heading north today I diverted into Sausalito for this photo of Andrey Melnichenko’s yacht “A”. Pretty awesome stuff just sitting there cooling its heel (or rudders!).
Click here to see a bigger version!
One of my favorite local blogs is California Travels by San Jose-based Tom and Margaret Husband.
Tom and Margaret do an outstanding job of sharing their adventures around the Bay Area and Northern California. Tune in to their posts for a real treat!
I’ve not had much experience with printing photos on canvas – but recently decided to give the folks at Snapfish a try – due mostly to their Flickr integration.
The photo I tried was this New Years Day 2010 photo of the San Francisco skyline – as seen from Fort Point down by the Golden Gate Bridge:
I ordered an 8×10 canvas of this photo – and I was delighted with the result. This photo was post-processed using some of the techniques learned from Trey Ratcliff’s texture tutorial – and it truly looks superb on canvas!
I’ve made this photo available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. You can’t use this image for any commercial purposes (contact me if you want to) – but feel free to share/remix it as long as you provide attribution back to me here on my blog.
Here’s a beautiful late afternoon shot of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from Baker Beach in San Francisco. This photo was shot using a Canon PowerShot S90 and post-processed in PhotoMatix Pro.