This is a shot inside San Francisco’s Ferry Building on a beautiful morning. The windows up top in the building provide beautiful indirect light into the market areas. This image was shot outside the Blue Bottle Coffee shop with my Fujifilm X-E2 and post-processed in Lightroom 5, Photoshop CC and Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4.
Sometimes I just see interesting light on an interesting subject. This is an example – walking along the street in San Francisco’s Financial District in interesting light and enjoying the two hats.
Captured with my Fujifilm X-E2 and post-processed in Lightroom 5 and VSCO Film.
I recently took a Sunday walk on the Stanford campus – something that was an almost weekly occurrence when Lily was alive. We always had a great time – she made lots of new friends and found lots of interesting smells along the way. And I got some nice exercise – which I’ve been missing!
On this Sunday morning, I had my Fujifilm X100S with me. Here’s one of the images – taken in the small area behind the Stanford Memorial Church. A great spot for peace and quiet – and for reading.
I post-processed this in Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC – applying a bit of a painterly effect.
From time to time, I look back at some of my older images – and my images from our amazing visit to Havana in early 2013 are now in that older category!
This is an image I hadn’t processed before – that struck me as I was browsing through my Cuba images in Lightroom.
We were in a large warehouse with a farmers’ market underway. Lots of nooks and crannies. As we walked around, we mostly had friendly encounters – with one except that I’ll always remember! This is a shot that I took looking out from within the warehouse – just loved the feel of the characters.
Shot with my Nikon D600 and post-processed in Lightroom 5 and VSCO Film.
San Francisco’s Kearny Street is one of our favorite photographic stages – there are a couple of whole blocks that have no parking on the eastern side of the street – the side which is also well lit during the day. You can stand on the other side of the street and just wait for interesting things to happen.
Here’s one from a recent visit with my friend Doug Kaye. I enjoyed the shapes in this image: squares, rectangles, triangles – and cones! The simplicity is the shot.
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1
Friday’s weather was drizzly in San Francisco. Perfect for my kind of street photography. Rain’s an unusual event this year in the City – but when it comes, it sets a whole different tone – umbrellas come out, we seem to walk faster and closer together, the reflections capture our eyes. Special times.
We were walking from the Vivian Maier exhibition at a gallery on Geary Street down Market Street to the Ferry Building and lunch at Slanted Door. I was walking slowly – trying to take in the sights on this special drizzly day.
Shooting the folks coming across a crosswalk can be fun – especially on this kind of day. This image was shot across from the Ferry Building with my Fujifilm X100S. It’s lunchtime, let’s go pick up something – and enjoy it!
We recently saw the Vivian Maier exhibition at the Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco. We’d seen the documentary film “Finding Vivian Maier” a week before.
At the exhibition, many of her photos struck me in terms mostly of composition but also with respect to tonality and how she used light/dark. A favorite – which also had some truly beautiful film grain is this untitled image of a woman laughing. She’s totally out of focus in the shot – but the story is there nonetheless.
As we were walking down California Street in the rain recently, I was about to snap an image of the cable cars when this man, coincidentially another photographer, walked in front of me. I thought the shot was a throw away – but decided to channel a bit of Vivian Maier into the shot – with tonality and adding grain in Lightroom. While it’s certainly not up to Maier’s composition, it’s a fun image – and that smile on his blurry face makes me smile!
It’s what really matters: do what you love. Or, as Apple has been asking, “What will your verse be?”
Here’s one example. An image from a photowalk with Doug Kaye at the Hyde Street cable car turnaround in San Francisco. Shot with my Fujifilm X-E2
Here’s another iPhone 5s image shot from a bench in front of San Francisco’s Pier 3 with my iPhone 5s. Actually, this is three images overlaid on each other.
I selected the three images based on the placement of the people in the frame. I used Photoshop’s auto-align layers feature to get them into alignment and then applied layer masks to isolate the subjects. The monochrome conversion was done using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 along with some dodging and burning to adjust highlights, shadows, and contrast – along with a touch of toning.
The image isn’t perfect – if you look closely, you’ll see a few flaws. It’s one of those 90 percent complete solutions!
I continue to delight in how great the whole renovation of San Francisco’s Embarcadero has turned out to be. Recently, I found a bench and just sat down and began taking pictures with my iPhone 5s as people walked, bicycled, ran, and skateboarded past. This was a great “stage” – with no parked cars along the curb and the interesting convergence of the Embarcadero Center buildings in the background. And that locked up bicycle provided an interesting element to “the set”. If you’re curious, this bench is just outside Pier 3 – a few steps south of the entrance to Hard Water.
After capturing this in my iPhone 5s, I post-processed it in Lightroom 5 applying a VSCO Film emulation and a bit more tweaking done in Photoshop CC.
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